Installing SharePoint on a machine joined to the domain

If you install SharePoint 2010 on a machine joined to the domain, you may encounter some issues when attempting to authenticate against your instance (particularly if you have NTLM Authentication configured).  If you are attempting to access SharePoint Central Administration, then you have no choice but to authenticate using NTLM Authentication.

One of the problems that you will probably encounter when attempting to authenticate against your SharePoint site while using NTLM Authentication is that it requires an active connection to a domain controller.  Well, if you are working remotely, you may not have an active connection to your domain unless you establish a VPN connection. 

So, if you encounter such a situation when attempting to authenticate against your SharePoint site, just make sure you have an active connection to your domain via VPN.

If you wish to avoid this type of issue in the future, you can probably guess the obvious solution to this problem--develop inside of a virtual machine.  Inside of a virtual machine, you can completely isolate your development environment from the issues associated with your host machine.