Setting up test environment.....What is involved?

Scenario:

We have completed the development phase and need to deploy the app to
the test environment. Needed to know what all things are involved in
setting up the test environment.
the application consists of Serviced Components and ASP.NET 2.0
pages/code and SQL 2005 database.

I think i would need the following:

Need to install the Serviced components on the test server
Copy over the ASP.NET pages and the precompiled Code behind.
However I should use the existing database server setup in the test
environment. I think it is a bad idea to backup the DEV database and
restore it to the TEST database, since it would already contain the
data that is supposed to get populated after you run the application
and play around with it right???

Solution:

An insight into deploying a .NET web application:

I think using something like NAnt and CruiseControl would be a much
better option. You can also create a deployment project for your web
app using VS.NET

If you prefer to use the manual way, you just need to simulate your
development enviroment on the test machine-folders and stuff.

Copy over your web app dll to the bin folder and make sure you copy all
the aspx pages. You dont need the code behind.

Regarding the database, create scripts for all your tables, sps,
triggers etc and run the script on the test/staging machine. This
should also populate the tables which are necessary to 'start' the
application such as user roles etc. Other than this, the transactional
data should not be populated using these scripts. The data should be
populated next.

I would suggest not to use your development data on the staging
machine. Create scripts to insert values into the newly created tables
and then populate the data. Make sure someone who knows the
functionality of the application and has an overview of the database
design, but doesnt know the code does this, as then the testing will
bring out some bugs which developers tend to hide using 'manipulated
data'.