Debug, build and deploy in mosses
What you are doing is great. I would look at this from a hardware point of view: RAM and hard drive.
SharePoint, Visual Studio and SQL Server (if in the same field) all love to gobble up as much RAM as possible. Make sure you are using at least 2 GB, if not 4 GB.
Plus Scott Gu says get the fastest hard drive . SSDs are a great way to dramatically improve performance. It's a little harder to balance cost with disk size at the moment.
source to share
For a long time, these are days of manually copying assemblies to the GAC, deploying features, and syncing changes to 12 hives.
STSDEV will create a new visual studio solution for your project, which will include build configurations that automate the tedious process of deploying the solution.
The solution has a "rootfiles" folder. This is where you add all the files you would normally copy directly to 12 hives. When deployed, all of these files will be moved to their respective folders. (you map the folder structure inside "root files" to corresponding directories in 12 hives).
It's much easier to use than it might seem. There are some really good tutorials out there on the codeplex site and after that you should be good to go.
As far as debugging is concerned, once the deployment process is simplified with STSDEV, attaches to the w3wp.exe process to test the code, then redistribution is easy.