Automating menial tasks...
Recently I have realized that most of the time that is taken away in a project is because of the menial tasks that we have to do. For example you have just designed a database and have just started writing an application. Now you need to test the application and do not have data in the database. How would you test it? Another small example is regular expression validators in ASP.Net. You can't remember all the regular expressions at all times and have to a bit of research to get your exactly required expression. Another really good example is creating entity objects. You want to use typed datasets and want to create entity objects which have properties that match the tables in a dataset. Basically you want to create one class for each table in the data set and use them as data carriers in the application.
These things are important but they take away a lot of your development time. So I think all these tasks should be automated. I have started writing a few utilities that actually automate the process of inserting data into the database or create regular expressions and test them or create entity objects.
These three utilities are at the top of the list for me as of now. Basically I am on a Utility writing spree these days...