Visual Studio not seeing Sharepoint

[HumblePie]

Okay, I have a strange problem here that I am at a loss for solving. I started a new job to be a sharepoint "guy" for this small business. So far, most of what I've needed to do hasn't required Visual studio and development for sharepoint. However, they want me to create a specific custom login page for a few sites.

So they have a server with Windows server 2008 running and sharepoint 2010 moss. Visual studio 2010 is also installed. They have several "sites" running for various clients they are hosting sharepoint for at different ports. All the sites seem to run with no problem.

So I go into Visual Studio, start a new empty sharepoint project, and attempt to validate that I'm using Sharepoint on the localhost. It errors out saying sharepoint is not running. WTF? I pull up a browser and can pull up localhost no problem. I can ping it. I check the apppools and everything is running fine. IIS manager shows every working fine as well.

So I figure, okay, I'll use one of the other ported sites on the server. Same problem. Sharepoint isn't found by Visual Studio for validation when starting a new project. I can click finish and compile a sharepoint project no problem, so I know all the dll's are being found and used correctly. But I can't deploy anything through visual studio. So at the moment I can just build the WSP and deploy through central admin, but it's a bit more of a pain in the ass for that, and makes debugging a massive pain.

Anyone have any idea what the hell is the problem here? I'm at a complete loss.

 

[HumblePie]

meh, figured it out. the person in charge of the sharepoint server database didn't add me as admin to the stupid sharepoint_config database. They thought since I was added as a farm admin to the site that I didn't need admin access to the sql database. They said I "had" admin which is what took so long for me to figure out what was wrong because I was looking at everything else. I had a feeling it was a permission problem, but the powers that be were idiots and didn't want to listen to me until I exhausted every other possibly it could be first. A minute solution turned into 8 hours of work for me because some admin wanted to be lazy and didn't want to do 1 minute worth of work.