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Asked: 2026-05-25T10:36:40+00:00

I’m looking to build a Silverlight application and want to display a Tag Cloud

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I’m looking to build a Silverlight application and want to display a Tag Cloud. I think I have the data processing (word counting) side of it going (thanks to answers to this question) but I’m looking for a good control to display the actual tag cloud.

I found this one, but I’m not a fan of how the sample image looks – it doesn’t seem to use the space very efficiently.

I also found this one but I didn’t have much luck with the sample. I had to work hard just to get it to compile on my machine (I think it was built for Silverlight 2?) and then when it ran, it was just an empty sphere with no tags. I couldn’t find any live sample of it so I just have the sample image to go off of.

Does anybody know of a good Tag Cloud control? Preferably one with the source available and with a live demo so I can try it out first.

EDIT: The control from Infragistics that Myles J mentioned looks okay but it also doesn’t seem to use space very efficiently. When there is a mix of large and small letters on a line, it looks something like this:

[small] [B    ] [Another Small]
        [  I  ]
        [    G]

I like tag clouds that manage to compress everything so it looks more like:

[B    ] [small]
[  I  ] [Another Small]
[    G]

Some really nice examples of this kind of cloud can be found at: http://www.neoformix.com/2008/ClusteredWordClouds.html

Or better yet, if it can mix orientation so some are horizontal and some vertical, that would be nice. Something like the first example on this page: http://www.tagcloud-generator.com/demo.php

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    After doing lots of searching, I eventually stumbled upon a great control by Mike Talbot. He seemed to have run into the issue that I did where he couldn’t find a good word cloud control. In his own words:

    I’ve been looking for a component that could show Wordle style word
    clouds. The only Silverlight component I could find was Infragistics
    xamTagCloud, but it really didn’t produce the output I was looking
    for. What I wanted was to be able to put lower importance words
    within the spaces left around larger entries.

    Having looked around the web I couldn’t find a component to buy or
    borrow so I decided to write my own.

    Lucky for me, he did all the hard work and then released the control (along with source code and a demo project) for free. Examples and the first post can be found at http://whydoidoit.com/2011/07/28/wordle-style-word-cloud-component-for-silverlight/. More information including documentation and the download can be found at:
    http://whydoidoit.com/wordcloud-for-silverlight/

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