I was running up one of our Windows 10 projects today and I encountered a somewhat cryptic error stating that Visual Studio was “Unable to activate Windows Store app…. The … process started, but the activation request failed with the error ‘The app didn’t start’”.
I figured there would be more information in the event log but this was not the case, with only this same message appearing there. Luckily it turns out that this issue isn’t specific to Windows 10 applications, and it was in fact this post that clued me on to removing the somewhat unnecessary app.config file that was still in my solution structure. Removing this file worked an absolute treat, although I can’t seem to work out why it fails since Visual Studio does sometimes warn about multiple versions of an assembly being referenced.