I had a strange error today using the Desktop App Converter with the parameters given from the Store for Business.

The conversion would fail with the following error:

DesktopAppConverter : error 'E_MANIFEST_USE_DEFAULT_VALUE_FAILED': Property 'Package.Applications.Application.Id' in AppxManifest.xml could not be set to the default value

I’m not sure why this fails as the PackageName is provided by the store and should be valid. An answer on stackoverflow suggested to use a different value for the PackageName parameter and then edit the manifest.

I don’t like this method as manual modifications of the manifest often leads to errors when submitting the application to the store.

So let’s have a look and see why we’re getting this error.

I searched for E_MANIFEST_USE_DEFAULT_VALUE_FAILED in the DesktopAppConverter folder and found 1 occurence in ManifestOps.ps1.

From a look at the code it wasn’t immediately clear where the validation failed so I decided to debug it.

(more…)