This morning I had the task of creating a TFS report to track our actual effort (in hours) for work items on projects. It's a special report for our accountants and the last thing I want to do is upset the guys who pay me. :)

I ran into some sticky situations that required some SSRS expressions to save me. One task was to default the start date of the report to the first day of the month. I set Start Date default value to the following expression.

=CDate(Month(Today()).ToString() + "/1/" + Year(Today()).ToString())

The second very important task was to alternate the row color. (TfsWorkITemTracking is the name of the DataSource)

=IIf(RowNumber("TfsWorkItemTracking") Mod 2 = 0, "Gainsboro", "White")