Device not receiving C# Windows Push Notifications because channel url incompatible

Question

After many hours of trial, I still fail to send push notifications to my app. This is what I did so far:

• Activate the service at https://appdev.microsoft.com

• Got the SID, lets call it ms-app://s-1-23-4-12345678901-...-12345678901

• Received the client secret, lets call it 12Lwq7526OqNY8iN-aLkwds23451345

• In my app I implented the following at some point (simplified):

  PushNotificationChannel channel = null;
  channel = await PushNotificationChannelManager.CreatePushNotificationChannelForApplicationAsync();
  System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(channel.Uri);
  

• This prints an url of that kind:

  https://db3.notify.windows.com/?token=AgY7AABrfRCVgRV%2ba4DwoDjC2omrnOVwCkdhCrrzlJi6UpIwHzcig6%2fG5xZfnDqU0%2fXoE848ddiqyTaTlSSltp2Dn9Z3qaPsMAyh7kS%2bmlis1%2bwoh%2b%2b4DsAK1yeV1d9G1rUIuFs%3s
  

• I added correct package name, publisher display name and publisher ID to my Package.appxmanifest file

• So I thought I was ready for testing push notifications. Using my own implementation of push sharp, fiddler output is the following:

  Request:

  POST https://db3.notify.windows.com/?token=AgY7AABrfRCVgRV%2ba4DwoDjC2omrnOVwCkdhCrrzlJi6UpIwHzcig6%2fG5xZfnDqU0%2fXoE848ddiqyTaTlSSltp2Dn9Z3qaPsMAyh7kS%2bmlis1%2bwoh%2b%2b4DsAK1yeV1d9G1rUIuFs%3s HTTP/1.1
  X-WNS-Type: wns/toast
  Authorization: Bearer EgAC4AA1hAZAQMAklDAAEgAAAUe8/AGsK8a/yk78/WEDQf+KUld/nYIvJ51OIoCPgAfwqbl0oo1sPDLhd9ChiO/iLFVzwlTPE3trp9oTkJxNXi0yUrf+FKjRciq7Utek9B/4dxH9lFNy0R5iwdMS0xNS0yLTIyNDgyMDE1NzEtMjczODcxMjkyMy0yMzM3MbsS59ZuQmXCIAFoOiAAAAAAAgzMOTB7OuFIezrhS60gEAAoANS45LjYuMTBiPoPMh3Nj5MAEOp0RhrcMUx6D50AtDuzWE1AAAAAABeAG1zLWiwcDovL3MtTk2Nzk3LTEzOTYwNDkxODYtMjEyODYwMTQ3MS04MDg1MDg2ODUtMzY3NjQyNTk3OQA=
  Content-Type: text/xml
  Host: db3.notify.windows.com
  Content-Length: 138
  
  <toast>
    <visual>
      <binding template="ToastText01">
        <text id="1">This is a test</text>
      </binding>
    </visual>
  </toast>
  

  Answer

  HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
  Content-Length: 0
  X-WNS-ERROR-DESCRIPTION: Channel URL incompatible with caller app
  X-WNS-MSG-ID: 5FC550364E079585
  X-WNS-DEBUG-TRACE: DB3WNS4011533
  Date: Mon, 23 Dec 2013 23:58:22 GMT
  

• I found this post Channel URL incompatible with caller app so far which was not really helping

I get the same error using the web service of http://31daysofwindows8.com/push. What can I do here? What could have gone wrong? Please note that this app has not been published yet to the store and I am testing on my local Windows 8.1 installation.

Answer 1

I was unable to use the "Associate App" approach because the customer wasn't comfortable with giving us their credentails.

What worked for me was to remove the following two elements from the .csproj file of the app:

<PackageCertificateKeyFile>...</PackageCertificateKeyFile>
<PackageCertificateThumbprint>...</PackageCertificateThumbprint>

Do that by either dragging the file into a text editor or unloading the project (using right click) and editing it using the xml editor (again in the context menu).

These elements might have snuck in when we associated our app with our testing app and stayed there when we removed the association and just set the identity as described by andreas.

<Identity Name="..." Publisher="CN=..." />

Edit: Just found out that doing this might break msbuild scripts that build packages. However, building app packages once within Visual Studio created new versions of these elements which then worked for me.