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windows-phone-8visual-studio-2015windows-phonewindows-store

Package Acceptance Validation Error: Package contains multiple files with identical names

Whilst building an old Windows Phone 8 app with Visual Studio 2015 I've come across and unusual error when I upload the built .XAP to the store. It throws the error:

Package acceptance validation error: Package cannot contain multiple files with identical filenames. Please correct the following files: Assets\ApplicationIcon.png, Assets\Background.png

I can view the contents of the .xap file by renaming the file to a .zip and looking inside. Sure enough there are two files with the same name (something I didn't think was even possible!):

Multiple files with the same name in a .zip

This app built fine in other versions of Visual Studio - any idea what is going on and how to fix this?

Solution

  • After some investigation it seems the root cause of the problem can be found in WMAppManifest.xml file in Properties.

    <IconPath IsRelative="true" IsResource="false">Assets/ApplicationIcon.png</IconPath>
<SmallImageURI IsResource="false" IsRelative="true">Assets/Background.png</SmallImageURI>
<BackgroundImageURI IsResource="false" IsRelative="true">Assets/Background.png</BackgroundImageURI>

    Simply changing all the forward slashes to backward slashes fixes the problem.

    <IconPath IsRelative="true" IsResource="false">Assets\ApplicationIcon.png</IconPath>
<SmallImageURI IsResource="false" IsRelative="true">Assets\Background.png</SmallImageURI>
<BackgroundImageURI IsResource="false" IsRelative="true">Assets\Background.png</BackgroundImageURI>

    And here is the inside of the .xap - no more duplicate files!

    No more duplicate

    No more duplicate files!

    This is an intensely annoying issue, I hope if anyone out there is still using Windows Phone 8 and comes across this it helps!