I’ve been head-down coding for several weeks (not quite to the ‘having other people feed me’ stage, but close).  I’m currently working on a VB.NET 2003 API for a large product and am missing refactoring tools.  To make up for it, I’ve been improving my regular expression skills and using Visual Studio's Search and Replace dialogue.  The VSEditor blog has a lot of good content on this feature (including a three part series).  The search and replace dialogues (both regular and the ‘in files’ versions) have a nice drop-down that displays the regular expression characters along with a description of what they do.

It’s a poor replacement for decent automated refactoring tools but it has made my life considerably easier over the last few weeks.