SharePoint Connection Error in Visual Studio 2010

When running Visual Studio 2010 on a Windows Server 2008 R2 / SQL Server 2008 / SharePoint 2010 development box, even though the logged-in account has local admin rights on the server, I still experienced a SharePoint Connection Error in Visual Studio 2010 on that same Virtual Machine. The text in the error dialog states that "the local SharePoint Server is not available".

Seems the error is caused be the logged-in account having insufficient rights against the SharePoint databases. Log into the SQL Server using the administrator account, and grant rights to the developer account; db_owner rights on the SharePoint configuration and admin database is reported to be sufficient -but as in this instance I was dealing with a development virtual machine, I opted for the easy route of granting sysadmin role to the dev user account :-)

SPServices Error With GetListItems Call

If you get an error similar to "Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes" when making an SPServices Web Service call to the GetListItems operation, check the premissions on the list you are querying - I got this error returned from the call, and found that the list permissions were set so that the current user did not have read permissions.

Granting read access to the user instantly removed the issue :)