Reading Scott Hanselman's blog about Validation some thoughts came up.
What do you do when you want to avoid tedious repetitive manual tasks? Automation
What do you do when you want to avoid tedious repetitive manual tasks in Software Development? Complain
One of the things I learned - I have to give due to a former mentor - is to automate some tasks I find extremely tedious and time consuming. I am willing to spend an extraordinary amount each time a new technology comes up to adapt an existing piece of code (Application Blocks) or build my own.
Some of the things that come to mind are:
Validation - www.peterblum.com has a nifty package
Data Access
Look and Feel
here and here I wrote soem more about software dev