Someone just directed me to a neat little feature coming down the line in Winter ’11 – user profile photos!  If you’ve been developing with Chatter, you’ve probably wanted to display a user’s profile image.  One of our technical library articles provided a workaround, but it was a bit kludgy.

It turns out that in Winter ’11, the user object will have a few more fields, including a ?FullPhotoUrl (if you have Chatter turned on).

I’ve just tried it out in my Winter ’11 pre-release org, executing ?System.debug([select fullphotourl from user]);, which yielded

So, I popped along to ?https://prerelna1.pre.salesforce.com/profilephoto/729x000000001M6/F, and there it was!

Yay!  I hope that makes it into the release!  You can learn more about the other Winter ’11 preview features on the release site of course.  Let me know if you find some other cool feature I missed!