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

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.