I am not going to discuss the profiles capability of .NET for the same reason that I chose not to write about the membership capabilities of .NET. This topic is widely covered in many books and on many of the top blog sites. I thought it might be more interesting to discuss a custom implementation of creating a profile and dynamic attributes so that a member's profile could be expanded with time. Also, this will get us a bit deeper into LINQ and how our framework works.

Another interesting topic that must be discussed absolutely while building profiles is avatars. An avatar is a small icon or image that is associated with each user's profile. This allows you to visually pick a profile out of the group with ease. Generally, an avatar is displayed next to just about everything a user does or interacts with. This could be their blog posts, forum posts, comments, and so on. It provides a sort of virtual face-to-face feeling. Here are some example avatars:

Of course, we could take a...