T-SQL (SS2K8) :: Forcing Existence Of Date Records For A Graph Of Counts Over Time

I'm trying to get a count of Employed and Available contractors per time period, and I have a table of Contracts... something like:

CREATE TABLE empContract(
empContractID INT IDENTITY(10000,1) PRIMARY KEY,
StartDate DATE NOT NULL,
EndDate DATE,
ContractorAssigned INT,
FOREIGN KEY ContractorID REFERENCES Contractor(ContractorID)
);

I don't think this is possible without the existence of some kind of Calendar table. Given the existence of a calendar table, the query seems really simple - just something like:

SELECT cal.CalendarDate, ec.ContractID
FROM Calendar cal LEFT JOIN empContract ec ON cal.CalendarDate BETWEEN ec.StartDate AND ec.EndDate

The left join forces the existence of all dates in a range (@StartDate and @EndDate), so that when I try to create a graph with counts by day, I don't have any gaps in my time series.