I have been using Visual Studio 2019 to develop desktop and mobile applications using Xamarin. I could successfully deploy my Xamarin UWP app to Microsoft Store until I upgraded my Visual Studio 2019 to 16.10.2.
Normally, before we can publish our UWP app to Microsoft Store, we need to launch WACK (Windows App Certification Kit) to validate our app package. However, in VS2019 16.10.2 (and onwards), there will be an error occurs, as shown in the screenshot below, and the validation cannot be completed.
MSBuild Project Build Output
Since my code is the same, so the first thing that I suspect is that the new updates in Visual Studio 2019 are causing this issue. Hence, I changed the verbosity of the project build output to Diagnostic, as shown below. This will help us understand better about what’s happening during the build.
By comparing the current build output with the one using the previous version of Visual Studio 2019, I realised that there is something new in the current build ouput. The parameter GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate is set to false while BuildAppxUploadPackageForUap is true, as shown below.
1>Target "_RemoveDisposableSigningCertificate: (TargetId:293)" in file "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Preview\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v16.0\AppxPackage\Microsoft.AppXPackage.Targets" from project "...UWP.csproj" (target "_GenerateAppxPackage" depends on it):
1>Task "RemoveDisposableSigningCertificate" skipped, due to false condition; ('$(GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate)' == 'true' and '$(BuildAppxUploadPackageForUap)' == 'true') was evaluated as ('false' == 'true' and 'true' == 'true').
1>Done building target "_RemoveDisposableSigningCertificate" in project "...UWP.csproj".: (TargetId:293)
Online Discussions
Meanwhile, there are only two discussion threads online about this issue.
On 22nd of June 2021, Nick Stevens first reported a problem that he encountered in publishing app to Microsoft Store after upgrading his Visual Studio 2019 to 16.10.2. However, his problem is about package family name and publisher name being marked as invalid.
Few days later, on 1st of July 2021, another developer Tautvydas Zilys also reported a similar issue as Nick Stevens’. Interestingly, the same Microsoft engineer, James Parsons, replied to them with the similar answer, i.e. adding the following property in their project file to set GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate to true.
<GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate>true</GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate>
As explained by James, the GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate will mimic the old behavior of Visual Studio where it will generate a certificate for us that has the publisher name that Microsoft Partner Center expects.
Fixed
Thankfully, after adding this line in the UWP csproject of my Xamarin project as shown below, the WACK works again without the error showing.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="14.0" ...>
...
<PropertyGroup>
...
<GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate>True</GenerateTemporaryStoreCertificate>
...
</PropertyGroup>
</Project>
That’s all to fix the issue. I hope this article, which is also the 3rd in the world discussing about this Visual Studio 2019 problem, is helpful to other Xamarin UWP developers who are running into the same problem.
References
- Store package fails validation after upgrade to VS2019 16.10.2 with Invalid package family name and Invalid package publisher name;
- Associating C++ UWP app with the Windows Store doesn’t associate the correct certificate.
KOSD, or Kopi-O Siew Dai, is a type of Singapore coffee that I enjoy. It is basically a cup of coffee with a little bit of sugar. This series is meant to blog about technical knowledge that I gained while having a small cup of Kopi-O Siew Dai.
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