Simplyfying refactoring by making things obsolete

A very simple one I ran into today - when you are refactoring things, sometimes old methods are no longer required, but for the sake of backward compatiblity your want to retain them. To make sure your own code no longer calls the deprecated method, simply use the ObsoleteAttribute:

[ObsoleteAttribute("Warning you want the compiler to give")]
public void ObsoleteMethod()
{
  // ....
}

If you now recompile your program, every call to ObsoleteMethod displays the message "Warning you want the compiler to give" in the output window - you might want to change that message to something more useful ;-).