If you followed my last post, I promised you a great way to do production deployements across all your web front ends with one double click of the mouse. The fundamental component to making this work is SharePoint solution packages. This isn’t a new idea; in fact, many people have already blogged on it:
Chris O’Brien
Chris Johnson
MSDN
There are two things you can do in addition to what they described. You can add the .ddf file into the visual studio project and include the “MakeCab /f filename.ddf” command into the post events build script to enable the creation of the solution file automatically. Additionally, the commands to add the solution, and even deploy the solution can be put into a batch file that you create. Hence, your production administrator and perform all of your updates with one double click.
Also, as an FYI, this processes is one of the topcis discussed at length in Mindsharp's SharePoint Developer course.
Phil Wicklund