What are the best practices for releasing code from a development to production server?

http://www.developer.com/open/article.php/998241 gives a decent overview.

My tip is to also track versions of all prod deployments so you know which one was active in production when.

I was using ant, and hated it. What I do now is check in all code into subversion, then if it's ready for release, tag it, then check out the tag directly onto the production server.