Querying Most Recent Values Per Category Per Item, Alternatives To Subqueries?

Hopefully someone can suggest a better solution than what I'm currently hobbling along with.Basically, I've got a table that has rows inserted (with a timestamp) whenever there is a change to one of the values of a particular "item". So, what I want is to return a dataset of the latest value for each category, for each particular item. I'm guessing that what I'm trying to acheive is doable in some elegant and performant fashion. Something maybe involving a ROLLUP or WITH CUBE or something amazingly obvious. But for the time being, I've got a less-elegant query that returns the correct data. It just uses subqueries.Here's the T-SQL to run my scenario:  DECLARE @actionHistoryTable TABLE ( itemID int, actionType int, actionValue nvarchar(50) NULL, actionTime datetime )
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1000, 1, 'fork', '1/1/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1000, 2, '27', '1/2/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1000, 3, '200', '1/12/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1000, 2, '1', '1/1/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1000, 3, '204', '1/1/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1000, 1, 'ball', '1/3/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1026, 2, '20', '1/10/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1026, 2, NULL, '1/5/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1026, 1, 'hotdog', '1/6/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1026, 3, '2511', '1/8/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1026, 3, '375', '1/7/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1026, 1, 'mustard', '1/5/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1013, 1, 'rock', '1/2/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1013, 1, 'paper', '1/21/2008')
INSERT @actionHistoryTable VALUES( 1013, 3, '10', '1/20/2008') 
-- JUST DISPLAY THE RAW TABLE FOR THIS EXAMPLE
SELECT * FROM @actionHistoryTable 
-- THIS RETURNS THE RESULTS I'M WANTING, IT ROLLS-UP THE LATEST VALUE FOR EACH ACTION_TYPE FOR EACH ITEMID
SELECT aht.itemID     
,( SELECT TOP 1 aht2.actionValue 
    FROM @actionHistoryTable aht2           
    WHERE aht.itemID = aht2.itemID AND aht2.actionType = '1'           
    ORDER BY aht2.actionTime DESC ) as 'latest type 1 value'     
,( SELECT TOP 1 aht2.actionValue FROM @actionHistoryTable aht2           
    WHERE aht.itemID = aht2.itemID AND aht2.actionType = '2'           
    ORDER BY aht2.actionTime DESC ) as 'latest type 2 value'     
,( SELECT TOP 1 aht2.actionValue FROM @actionHistoryTable aht2           
    WHERE aht.itemID = aht2.itemID AND aht2.actionType = '3'           
    ORDER BY aht2.actionTime DESC ) as 'latest type 3 value'
FROM @actionHistoryTable aht
GROUP BY aht.itemID  Is there a better way?-Steve