So you're ready to deploy your webpart....

You've built your web part, deployed it on your VPC, now it's time to deploy it on the production WSS box...here's what I did.

1. In Visual Studio, switch to Build configuration
2. Rebuild and deploy once again to your local VPC
3. Go to the project\bin\release directory, look for Setup.bat, and edit the file, looking in line 22 to change the target URL from your http://myserver VPC server to http://prodserver
4. Zip up the entire Release directory, then copy it to your prod server
5. RDC to the prod server - you'll need to use an account that's in the SharePoint admin group. Otherwise when you run the stsadm.exe command you'll get some Object Not Found error messages, or messages about being unable to bind to SQL Server
6. Unzip your project, then run Setup.exe
7. Once done, the web part will be activated on the root site of your portal/WSS site. You can open it up, then add in the web part. You could also go to any other site and activate the web part and do the same.
8. When you add in your web part, if you get the error message: "Unable to add selected web part(s). Incompatible Web Part markup detected. Use *.dwp Web Part XML instead of *.webpart Web Part XML", well, the catch is you're using the wrong project base class. That is - with WSS/MOSS, you can use the ASP.Net 2.0 web part framework, or the good ol SharePoint web part framework. The SDK provides a good explanation of this. If you built your web part from the VS.Net template, then you'll need to make sure you're using the ASP.Net base class: System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart instead of Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.WebParts. How to fix this? That's for another post.