SharePoint 2010 Project Deployment Issues in Visual Studio 2010

Recently I ran into the following issue when I tried to deploy a SharePoint 2010 Project in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. In the output window the following message was displayed and the deployment failed:

Error occurred in deployment step ‘Retract Solution’: The local SharePoint server is not accessible. Check that the server is running and connected to the SharePoint farm.

It turned out (thank you Event Viewer!) that the account that triggers the Deploy action in Visual Studio 2010 (typically the account you used to login in Windows) needs to have permissions in both the Configuration database and the Content database.