Error occurred in deployment step ‘Recycle IIS Application Pool’: The local SharePoint server is not available. Check that the server is running and connected to the SharePoint farm.

I got the above error today while trying to deploy a SharePoint 2010 project in Visual Studio 2010. Very frustrating!!

The answer turned out to be simple enough, though no clues are really provided in the error message (typical). I had to add my user account to the db_owner role for the SharePoint_Admin database that the site I was deploying to was using.

Once I did that, the deployment in Visual Studio did just great.

The following post led me to the solution: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepoint2010programming/thread/a97a8413-a0ae-47f2-aab7-fae1cf40595a