Unable to Activate Windows Store App

Question

I installed a retail version of Windows 8 Pro. I downloaded and installed Visual Studio Express 2012. I asked for and received a developers certificate. Then I tried to c

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue, and tried rebuilding, cleaning, deleting temp files, rebooting the computer, etc... and nothing helped.

Then finally I made a release build then went back to debug. And now it works.

I have no idea what happened, nor if that really helped, but it's worth a try.

Answer 2

This has happened to me in the past and I have always found that deleting the build directories resolves it.

However this time this is not working for me. I have tried - Rebooting - Deleting build directories - Running Build | Clean Solution in VS - Renewing Developer Account

The only thing that will work for me is changing my Package name under the Package.appxmanifest

However I am not overly happy with this as a solution. I will keep investigating.

Answer 3

This error generally comes when you try to deploy in debug mode.

I would suggest, deploy the app first in release mode and then try in debug mode.

This worked for me.

Answer 4

This can be solved by Uninstalling the app from the start screen then again building the app from Visual Studio.

Answer 5

In my case, the C# UWP app had a native library which failed in the application startup code, and called exit(1). The symptoms were identical to those in the question, though. Visual Studio would throw a message:

Unable to activate Windows Store app '88888888-6666-5555-4444-111111111111_abcdefgh!App'. The Acme.exe process started, but the activation request failed with error 'Operation not supported. Unknown error: 0x80040905'.

In addition, there was a message in the UWP app Windows log under Microsoft\Windows\Apps\Microsoft-Windows-TWinUI/Operational: event ID 5961, message:

Activation for 88888888-6666-5555-4444-111111111111_abcdefgh!App failed. Error code: Unknown HResult Error code: 0x80040905. Activation phase: COM App activation

Internally, the C# part would try to construct a native class instance from the App constructor, the native class constructor would encounter an unrecoverable error and bail. From the UWP subsystem standpoint, and from the debugger standpoint, though, this looked as something distinct from the mere programmatic exit. I'll leave this answer here, 'cause I've spent some time chasing various UWP failure scenarios instead of running under a native debugger.

I've replaced the exit() call with throw ref new Exception(E_INVALIDARG). At least this way the error manifests in the managed debugger, and the message is descriptive.