In this post, Scott Guthrie discusses
Microsoft Web Deploy which is a free server technology that enables a comprehensive publishing and deployment mechanism.
Source: ScottGu's Blog
This post will provide a step by step tutorial on how to install Web Deploy and enable it on a web-server. I’ll then demonstrate how you can use Visual Studio 2010 to directly publish to servers using Web Deploy, as well as how you can use Visual Studio to create installation packages that you can use to automate the deployment of your applications.