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Fix for AdControl failure on Windows Phone 7

Oct 29th, 2010 by

I’m working on a Windows Phone 7 application that is using the Microsoft ad network.  Microsoft simplifies the process by providing an AdControl control in the Advertising SDK.

To add the control to your XAML is easy.

    <my1:AdControl Grid.Row=’0′
                  ApplicationId=‘ba766 etc.’
                  AdUnitId=’100xxxxxxx’
                  Width=’480′
                  Height=’80′
                  HorizontalAlignment=‘Center’
                  VerticalAlignment=‘Center’ />

Next, you need to configure some ad campaigns on the Microsoft ad  center and add the correct ApplicationId and AdUnitId to your XAML. Now, when the AdControl is shown on the page, you should see it populated with data.

Failure

In our app everything worked correctly for a day or two.  Eventually we noticed that we did not see the ad when testing on the device.   After wasting hours of time  investigating the problem the answer emerged.

You must not disable the ID_CAP_NETWORKING capability in the WMAppManifest.xml

  <Capabilities>

      <Capability Name="ID_CAP_IDENTITY_DEVICE" />
      <Capability Name="ID_CAP_IDENTITY_USER" />
      <Capability Name="ID_CAP_NETWORKING"/>

   </Capabilities>

Failing to set this capability causes the AdControl to fail when connecting to the ad network.  This, in turn, causes the AdControl to collapse in the UI. So no ads.

In hindsight, this makes sense, as the control needs to contact the server.  But this isn’t documented anywhere that I have found.

Posted in Windows Phone, WP7

2 Responses to “Fix for AdControl failure on Windows Phone 7”

  1. Wil Campbell says:
    November 1, 2010 at 10:33 pm

    Hey, great tip – I ran into this same issue today. One note is that the

    also appears to be required for the AdControl to function (in addition to the capabilities you list in your great blog post).

    Thanks for saving me a bunch of time debugging this.

  2. Linksammlung 25/11/2010 | Silverlight, WPF & .NET says:
    November 25, 2010 at 3:50 am

    [...] Fix for AdControl failure on Windows Phone 7 (Walt Ritscher) [...]