Cannot connect to the SharePoint site in Visual Studio 2010

When creating a SharePoint in Visual Studio 2010 on a SharePoint server, you may still get the error : "Cannot connect to the SharePoint site":



You are using a site collection administrator account but the problem is that the site collection admin account doesn't have access to the SP config database and content database. Note that Visual Studio goes against the API directly so it can't do anything until it can read from the database. Here's what's in the SP log:

02/17/2012 15:08:49.68 vssphost4.exe (0x071C) 0x136C SharePoint Foundation Database 880j High SqlError: 'Login failed for user 'us\siteAdminDeveloper'.' Source: '.Net SqlClient Data Provider' Number: 18456 State: 1 Class: 14 Procedure: '' LineNumber: 65536 Server: 'US.local,1433'
02/17/2012 15:08:49.69 vssphost4.exe (0x071C) 0x136C SharePoint Foundation Database 3351 Critical SQL database login for 'SharePoint_Config' on instance 'SqlHost' failed. Additional error information from SQL Server is included below. Login failed for user 'US\siteAdminDeveloper'.

Since you are doing development on SharePoint, use an account that's an Farm Administrator to avoid problems like this.

SharePoint ACL issue when adding custom images, CSS, script files

I just customized the master page of a MOSS 2007 site and also applied a custom theme that I created to it. It looked great (it's quoted from the customer, no kidding :). However, when a senior manager of the client decided to view it, the site just kept prompting for login continuously. He's not impressed. I knew he was able to view the site BEFORE any customization was applied. So how could an unghosted master page and a modified copy of an existing theme result in access issue?

It turned out that the new resources, a few image files and new CSS files, that I added for the customizations are the culprit. Or rather the ACLs on these new files. Several files added to the images folder and themes folder in the 12 hives didn't inherit the permissions from the parent folder for whatever reason (most other added files inherited fine). As soon as the ACLs on these files are set properly, the site stopped the endless login prompting.