When using Background Agents in Windows Phone you may experience an InvalidOperationException with the message ‘BNS Error: The action request has expired‘ like so:
This error means that your background task either threw an exception or failed to call NotifyComplete(). This error will not go away once you’ve fixed the issue – the background task must be removed. You can either do this in code, or uninstall the app and install it again.
There are a few Exceptions Windows Phone throws when a Background Task isn’t correctly configured, sadly they’re very misleading. In this blog post I’ll outline some of the common exceptions you’ll get and how to go about fixing them.
When you call ‘ScheduledActionService.LaunchForTest’ you may get an InvalidOperationException like so:
This Exception means you haven’t added the ExtendedTask info in the WMAppManifest.xml file (found in ‘Properties’). Open the file in the XML editor (right-click on it and select ‘Open With’), and make sure you’ve entered the ExtendedTask info:
<Tasks>
<DefaultTask Name ="_default" NavigationPage="MainPage.xaml"/>
<ExtendedTask Name="BackgroundTask">
<BackgroundServiceAgent Specifier="ScheduledTaskAgent" Name="TileUpdateAgent" Source="WP7LiveTileDemo" Type="WP7LiveTileDemo.Agents.TileUpdateAgent" />
</ExtendedTask>
</Tasks>
The values are as follows:
If anything is wrong with the ExtendedTask declaration you’ll get InvalidOperationException or FileNotFoundException being thrown from Microsoft.Phone.ni.dll, it’ll look something like this:
Make sure to double-check your ExtendedTask XML is perfect, especially the Source and Type attributes.
So you’re getting the most awful error Silverlight can throw… I really wish I could tell you that if you hope on one leg while reciting the alphabet in reverse order will give you a vaguely helpful error message, but I can’t. The most common causes are:
Basically if there’s anything Silverlight doesn’t like at runtime, it’ll tend to throw this error. I’ll try to help you with the last two on the list above.
In the stack trace for the error, check for the tell tale references to ‘MeasureOverride’. This means you’ve probably got a layout issue. What you’ve likely got is a fixed-width element, and the children require more space than you’re providing. In my case I had a table column that was 2 pixels too narrow. If your layout allows it, try to avoid using pixel sizes even if you know the correct size since sometimes additional styling can change required sizes slightly.
This one is the trickiest to solve, for obvious reasons. The best way I’ve found to debug is to go completely old school and strip everything back to the bare minimum and see if your code works then. This includes removing data binding. You need to get the page to display without any errors. Once you’ve reached this point slowly start re-introducing code. Eventually the error will re-appear and you should have a much better idea of exactly where the problem is. Of course you have to solve the problem still, but at least you know roughly where it is now.