Today, when I’m trying to continue working on one of my Windows Phone app and suddenly the app force quit every time I run the app. Man, it is working correctly last night and now it doesn’t work anymore! What the hack is this “An unknown error has occurred. Error: 80020101.”? The error did not give me a good idea what is it all about.

I can’t really guess what actually happening. After spending a long time checking what went wrong, then I found out Google AdMob control which I use to display advertisement is not working correctly and it keep on throwing error when it put into visual tree.  So I do some search and found out that the AdMob SDK has cause quite number of problems in current version. Lot of developers complain about this problem but no work around or fix is provided by Google.

I try several way like putting try/catch, generate ad from code behind, generate ad from loaded function and many more. All doesn’t work and it still throwing error, ARGH!! There are only 2 options left for me. First option, completely remove AdMob from my app and I will gain nothing from the app. Second option, ignore the error.

Since the app I created is pretty simple and it is for demo purpose, so I will keep the ad and ignore the error.  By setting exception handled to true, it should stop the app from force close when running. Of cause it will still pop up error when you running in debugging mode. I will just comment out the ad control coding part when I debugging the app and un-comment it when I finish develop it.

I had submitted the app to Windows Phone marketplace. I not sure whatever it can go through the certification process or not but I shall update this post when the result is out. Yes, my app get through the certification without problem. In the end, I still cannot figure out what is actually happening to the SDK which is working flawless for the pass 2 weeks and it now cause me so much trouble. Let’s hope the developer (Google) fix this mess as soon as possible. Meanwhile, only 2 options, either remove all or ignore it!

[Update] I had fix the problem using Ad Rotator instead, check out my latest post here.

by Ooi Keng Siang (Microsoft Student Partners) via Ooiks’s Blog