Download an ASP.NET Tag Cloud Sample

Update:

Rama Krishna Vavilala created a very nice cloud control for ASP.NET. Check out his article on CodeProject.

Great stuff! I recommed using his control instead of ours. It's better! We are now using it as well.

The original post

Todays' post actually violates my "pays my bill" principle so read with caution ;-)

We just released a small feature we call the "Flugwolke": This niftly little page shows you the most popular flight searches on Wingio. This feature certainly is of no use to our average user but we thought it would be cool to do. So we did it ;-)

We really thought hard how to visualize this. Our options were a simple ordered list (boring), a pie chart (nice but does not scale too well above 10 results) and a Tag Cloud. As you see on the page, we decided to use the cloud approach (and hence the name Flugwolke which roughly translates to "FlightCloud" in English).

So I went on the hunt for a working sample in ASP.NET and didn't find any. There are some nice articles (the one on EchoChamberProject being my favorite) but none of them did fit my bill. So I implemented one myself and decided it to share with interested parties.

Download sample ASP.NET tage cloud implementation (in VS.NET 2005/C#)!

The sample shows the following:

• Access the Wingio FlightCloud web service to retrieve a DataTable with the most popular flight destinations. This is live data!
  
• Render the results into a tag cloud

The algorithm used for this sample implementation is pretty simplistic but it's okay for the use case. Check the article mentioned above for more advanced algorithms. The alorithm is very easy to port to ASP.NET.

The sample is "slightly" documented. Use it for whatever you want to use it for.

Cheers

Stefan