This Toolkit is now deprecated and is now
The Windows Azure Toolkit for Windows Phone provided developers with the first iteration of support for building backend services for Windows Phone apps using Windows Azure. The main areas of feedback we received from mobile developers was that they
wanted a turn-key set of services for common functionality such as notifications, auth, and data.
Windows Azure Mobile Services directly reflects this feedback by enabling developers to simply provision, configure, and consume scalable backend services. The downloads for this toolkit will be removed on the week of Feb 1st 2013 and all future improvements
will be channeled into Windows Azure Mobile Services rather than this toolkit.
To get started with Mobile Services,
sign up for a Windows Azure account and receive 10 free Mobile Services.
You’ll find the following troubleshooting topics in this section:
- User is Unable to Install the Certificate, Log in and Register in the Windows Phone Application
- The 'take picture' Button Doesn’t Open the Camera When the Phone App is Tethered
- An Error is Displayed Saying 'Location is not available' When Creating a New Project
- An Error is Displayed When Clicking the 'Microsoft Push Notifications' Menu Option
- The Phone Application Doesn’t Show the Identity Providers List
- The Phone Application Receives Not Found as Responses to all Requests
- A Database Error is Displayed When Accessing the Web Administration Portal
- A 'Database Already exists' Error is Displayed When Accessing the Web Administration Portal
If you think you’ve found a bug and it’s not listed here, please take a look at
Issue Tracker.
User is Unable to Install the Certificate, Log in and Register in the Windows Phone Application
Symptoms
When you start up the Windows Phone application, an error is displayed when you try to:
- Install the SSL certificate
- Log in with an existing user
- Register a new user
Cause
The Windows Phone application is unable to communicate with the Web Role that is hosting the toolkit services.
Solution
- Make sure that the Web Role services are running in the Windows Azure Compute Emulator. If it is not, in
Solution Explorer right-click the Windows Azure project, point to
Debug, and click Start new instance.
- Once the Windows Azure Compute Emulator is running, open its user interface. To do this, in the Windows taskbar right-click the Windows Azure Emulator’s icon (
)
and then click Show Computer Emulator UI.
- In the Windows Azure Compute Emulator window, review the Service Details
of the current deployment to make sure that the service is running over
HTTPS on port 443 and HTTP on port 10080, both on
IP address 127.0.0.1. If it is running on a different port or IP address, stop the deployment, and exit the Windows Azure Compute Emulator. Before starting a new debugging instance as explained above, make sure that the ports
443 and 10080 are unlocked
The 'take picture' Button Doesn’t Open the Camera When the Phone App is Tethered
Symptoms
When the Windows Phone sample application is deployed to a Windows Phone device and tethered, the
take picture functionality (
)
in the list blobs pivot item does not open the phone camera to capture a photo
Cause
The CameraCaptureTask works fine when tethered, but if you have the
Zune client application opened on your machine, it will keep a lock on your Windows Phone device’s MediaLibrary. Therefore, the captured picture cannot be stored.
Solution
Close the Zune client application. If you are trying to debug through the
CameraCaptureTask, you could use the WPConnect tool instead of the
Zune client for device connectivity.
For more details, see the following article
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/gg180729(VS.92).aspx.
An Error is Displayed Saying 'Location is not available' When Creating a New Project
Symptoms
When the user attempts to create a new Windows Phone Cloud Application or
Windows Phone Empty Cloud Application project, Visual Studio shows an error message saying, "Location is not available".
Cause
When the user has ReSharper installed in his/her environment, the project creation fails due to an access denied error on the temporary folders created by the Visual Studio Template Wizard during the process.
Workaround
Disable ReSharper. To do this, in Visual Studio click
Options inside the Tools menu. Now, go to ReSharper section, click
Suspend and then OK. After that, close and reopen your Visual Studio instance and you will now be able to create new
Windows Phone Cloud Application and Windows Phone Empty Cloud Application projects.
In order to enable ReSharper again, in Visual Studio click
Options inside the Tools menu. Now, go to
ReSharper section, click Resume and then OK.
An Error is Displayed When Clicking the 'Microsoft Push Notifications' Menu Option
Symptoms
When you start the Web Role running the Toolkit’s services, log in using the administrator credentials and click the
Microsoft Push Notifications menu option, then you get one of the following errors:
- "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." – When using ACS for authentication
- "Guid should contain 32 digits with 4 dashes (xxxxx-…-xxxx)." – When using Membership for authentication
Cause
The reason why you are encountering these errors is that you are using the same Windows Azure Storage account for running your Windows Phone Cloud Application project using different authentication methods. That is, you have selected to run your application
first using Windows Azure Access Control Service (ACS) and then ASP.NET Membership or vice versa.
Solution
To fix this issue you need to remove users created with the old authentication method in the Windows Azure Storage tables used by the application. To do this, you can use a tool like
https://www.myazurestorage.com to remove the old users in the
PushUserEndpoints table (if you are using the Storage Emulator you can use other tools like the
Azure Storage Explorer).
The Phone Application Doesn’t Show the Identity Providers List
Symptoms
When developing an application using Windows Azure Access Control Services , with Visual Web Developer 2010 Express and Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, when running the phone application you get the error:
Cause
The name of the relying party realm does not match between the Azure and Phone projects.
Solution
Make sure that the Relying Party Realm set in the App.xaml file is the same as the one set in the
ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file in the Azure project:
The Phone Application Receives Not Found as Responses to all Requests
Symptoms
When running an application developed from one of the project templates or running one of the samples included in the toolkit, the phone application shows the following error message:
Cause
The causes for this error could be several, most commonly:
- The Windows Azure Web Role has not finished starting
- The user has not installed the SSL certificate in the phone
Solution
If the Web Role has not started, wait until the Web Role has started correctly and retry the operation in the phone application.
If the Web Role has started correctly, it is possible that you forgot to
install the SSL certificate.
If you are running one of the samples or application developed using the project templates:
- Press the back button until you reach the log in page.
- In the log in page, click the Install certificate link. This will open Internet Explorer in the Windows Phone Emulator at
http://127.0.0.1:10080/127.0.0.1.cer.
Note: In order to consume the REST services over HTTPS in a Windows Phone device or in the Windows Phone Emulator, you need to use a trusted SSL certificate. If you do not have one, you can use a self-signed certificate, but you need to install
it in the phone before consuming the services. Since the Windows Azure Computer Emulator always uses the 127.0.0.1 self-signed certificate, we need to install it in the Windows Phone Emulator before continuing with the next steps.
- Click the shield icon to install the Windows Azure Compute Emulator’s SSL certificate in the Windows Phone Emulator. Finally, click
install to confirm that you want to install the certificate.
Important: If you leave the Windows Phone Emulator open, you do not need to install the certificate every time that you run the application. However, if you close the Windows Phone Emulator, you will have to install it again.
A Database Error is Displayed When Accessing the Web Administration Portal
Symptoms
When you start the Web Role running the Toolkit’s services, you get the error:
The underlying provider failed on Open.
Cause
The reason why you are running into this problem is that SQL Server does not have the correct permissions to access the
App_Data folder in the Web Role project.
Solution
To fix this issue you need to remove the App_Data folder in the Web Project and re-create it:
- Right-click on the App_Data folder, click Delete and confirm the operation.
- Right-click on the Web project and select Add ->
Add ASP.NET Folder -> App_Data.
A 'Database Already exists' Error is Displayed When Accessing the Web Administration Portal
Symptoms
When you start the Web Role running the toolkit’s services, you get the error:
The underlying provider failed on Open, with a detail that says: ‘Database already exists’.
Cause
The reason why you are running into this problem is that you have created two different solutions with the same name, and the database file from the first one is still attached to the SQL Server user instance.
Solution
To fix this issue you need to rename the database file in one of the two solutions:
- Right-click on the Web Role in the Windows Azure project and click Properties.
- Click Settings, select the SqlDataContextConnectionString and change the value of the settings:
AttachDBFileName and Initial Catalog to a new unique value.
More Information
The following articles may be useful when troubleshooting a Windows Phone application:
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