debugging

BNS Error: The action request has expired

When using Background Agents in Windows Phone you may experience an InvalidOperationException with the message ‘BNS Error: The action request has expired‘ like so:

BNS Error: The action request has expired

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.

Posted by Dan in Windows Phone, 0 comments

InvalidOperationException and FileNotFoundException with Background Tasks in Windows Phone

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.

Failure to Run

When you call ‘ScheduledActionService.LaunchForTest’ you may get an InvalidOperationException like so:

InvalidOperationException on LaunchForTest

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:

  • Specifier – The type of background agent, you can only have one of each type
  • Name – Name for this task, can be anything you like
  • Source – The name of the Assembly (without the .dll extension) that contains the agent. If this is wrong you’ll get both InvalidOperationException and FileNotFoundException exceptions
  • Type – The full class name (ie. must include the namespace path too) of the agent you set up in code. If this is wrong you’ll get an InvalidOperationException

InvalidOperationException and/or FileNotFoundException

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:

InvalidOperationException from a BackgroundTask in WP InvalidOperationException stack trace from a BackgroundTask in WP

Make sure to double-check your ExtendedTask XML is perfect, especially the Source and Type attributes.

Posted by Dan in Windows Phone, 1 comment

AG_E_PARSER_BAD_PROPERTY_VALUE

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.

Layout Issue

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.

Some other problem

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.

Posted by Dan in Windows Phone, 0 comments