Yesterday afternoon SQL Server Magazine revealed its Editors' Best and Community Choice Awards for 2010 -- and Who is Active received the top honor in the Best Free Tool category.
I'm deeply honored to receive this kind of award, and it validates all of the work I've put in on the tool over the last three years. I fully plan to continue the trend in 2011 with even more features designed to help you easily figure out what's going on in your SQL Server instances. I'm also going to finally put together some documentation, and am already at work on a Who is Active presentation that I'll be delivering at various community events and in webcasts.
To those who have contacted me about the tool, thank you for all of the great feedback over the past few years. Who is Active was originally a simple, 100-line replacement for sp_who2, and due in no small part to your ideas and insights I've been able to push it to a whole new level.
A final note to the database developers out there: Don't take attitude from developers who specialize in C#, Java, or other procedural languages. I've had these people tell me that SQL is not a "real" language and that database developers are not "real" developers. Yet here we have a solid case where a stored procedure has won a higher honor than polished UI-based products created by commercial development teams. If you're a database developer, you are a real developer. And you're in control of the most important part of any relevant business application: the data. Stay strong.