Displaying a User's Sharepoint Profile Picture

This week I was building a web part and needed to display the profile picture for a user. I figured this would be easy enough to do, but as is usually the case with Sharepoint, I was wrong. Several hours and multiple Google searches later, I put together a neat solution:

UserProfileManager profileManager = new UserProfileManager();

UserProfile userProfile = profileManager.GetUserProfile(loginName);

try

{

pictureURL = userProfile["PictureURL"].Value.ToString();

}

catch

{

pictureURL = "/_layouts/images/no_pic.gif";

}