Over the last few days I’ve spent some spare time playing around with LINQ and LINQ for SQL (aka DLINQ) – both of which are incredibly cool technologies.
Specifically, I’ve been experimenting with building a photo management application that provides “tagging” support. If you aren’t familiar with photo tagging, you might want to check out FlickR – which implements a tagging mechanism that enables users to easily annotate pictures with textual words that provide a way to easily organize and sort them.
For my photo-browser I wanted to implement a “tag cloud” on every page of the site that lists the most popular tags in use on the left-hand side, and enables users to be able to click a tag within the “tag cloud” to filter the pictures by them:
When a user clicks on an individual picture I then wanted them to see a more detailed version of the picture, as well as all the tags it has been annotated with:
I then wanted end-users to be able to click on the “edit tags” link on the page to switch into an edit mode using Ajax, where they can easily create or edit new tags for the picture. Any word can be suggested:
When the tags are saved, I wanted the “tag cloud” to dynamically update with the current list of tags being used across all photos on the site, and size each tag within the cloud based on the tag’s frequency (higher usage frequency produces bigger font sizes for that tag):
Implementing the above application is really easy using ASP.NET 2.0, LINQ and Atlas, and provides a nice demonstration of some of the really cool new data capabilities that LINQ enables.
Click Here to Read My Step-By-Step Tutorial of How to Build the Above Application using LINQ, ASP.NET 2.0 and Atlas (full source code provided)
Hope this helps,
Scott