Going from arduino & sketch to production I've got a little proof of concept thing going here with an arduino &amp; Ethernet shield. The basic idea is for it to ping out much like a heartbeat monitor every so often so I can see if my house still has internet connectivity. 

The arduino works nicely and does exactly what I want. I've ordered a board to be made with just the basic components needed and now want to put the code on to it. They gave me an option to load the code (Dragon AVR) during checkout and I'd love to try that out. So, the question is - how on earth do I package up code for something like that? I've seen a number of people ask the same thing for large manufacturing scales / similar setup where they don't fancy using the arduino &amp; IDE as a programmer. 

I've asked around on IRC and various other places but nobody seems to be able to give me specific and clear advice on whether it's possible and how to go about doing it.
"Intel Hex" is pretty much an industry standard and I'm quite certain the .hex files produced by the GNU AVR tools is Intel Hex format. Your vendor is almost certainly prepared to load your sketch from the .hex file.