Some days ago Eli Robillard wrote a fantastic post about how to build a sharepoint development machine it’s very similar to which I use, but in a last step, I would add a tool to maintain remote sessions. A tool as Secure Shell (ssh) or Remote Shell, I use rsh, because it’s easy for deployment and free, this comes with the Windows Services for Unix 3.5.
Using it I can install and uninstall solutions, features and webparts from my visual studio, external tools menu. Also you can add this to the post generation commands in order to deploy and get data from application pool prior to debug. (rsh machine iisapp)
