Deploying from dev to live

Guys, this may be a trivial question for you but here goes.

I am trying to work out the best deployment method for using nettiers.  I have a few sites running powered by the almighty tiers but having my dev server sitting next to me, and my live server being  a few hundred miles away in texas making changes and replicating them causes me untold stresses.

Is there an easy(ish) was of making structural DB changes, adding SPROCS etc to the local dev and moving them up to live without loosing any new customer info or data from my Live tables?

Any information would be greatly appreciated as currently i am haing to stop my live site, bring down the db, set it up next to my dev db and manually go through making changes which is not the best as the site is down and the client fears they are loosing custom from the down time.

Cheers in advance.

David Lawton

p.s @Swin, hows things going? U still down in London? might be making a journey down at the end of this/start of next year if you or any other London heads want to meet up.

I use RedGate's SQL compare to make sure my schemas are up to date.

 The problem is much larger than .netTiers, but thats the route that I went down. I don't work for RedGate, and I'm not getting paid to say this, their sql utilities are amazing. The amount of work that SQL Compare and SQL data compare save makes them worth every penny my boss dropped for them.

I have used the Comparison Suite for SQL Server from Quest Software:

http://www.quest.com/Comparison-Suite-for-SQL-Server/

It's worked pretty well for me, plus it's free.

Cheers for the details guys!

Muchos Gracias