Microsoft Ads control throwing exception in Windows Store App

This is the XAML you can get from Microsoft Ads SDK sample. According to the documentation, put this block of code in your page and replace the ApplicationId with the id you get from PubCenter by register your app for the ads purpose:

<StackPanel Grid.Row="3" Grid.ColumnSpan="3" Background="{StaticResource MSAdsBackgroundThemeBrush}" Orientation="Vertical">

                    <UI:AdControl

                       ApplicationId="4d075f8c-2db3-4484-ac37-6e446da687bd"

                       AdUnitId="150628"

                       Width="728"

                       Height="90"

                      Margin="0,0,0,0"

                      HorizontalAlignment="Center"

                      VerticalAlignment="Bottom"/>

 </StackPanel>

But from time to time, if you pay attention to the output view when your app is running. You can find the following messages:

A first chance exception of type 'MicrosoftAdvertising.Shared.AdException' occurred in MicrosoftAdvertising.winmd
A first chance exception of type 'MicrosoftAdvertising.Shared.AdException' occurred in MicrosoftAdvertising.winmd
A first chance exception of type 'MicrosoftAdvertising.Shared.AdException' occurred in mscorlib.dll

Sometimes it is led by some error message like this:

A first chance exception of type 'System.Net.WebException' occurred in System.dll
A first chance exception of type 'System.Net.WebException' occurred in System.dll
A first chance exception of type 'System.Net.WebException' occurred in System.dll
A first chance exception of type 'System.Net.Http.HttpRequestException' occurred in mscorlib.dll

Even your app does not access network at all. The interesting this is you still get to see ads in your app.

Then I put some code in my page to catch the error condition:

<UI:AdControl

     ApplicationId="4d075f8c-2db3-4484-ac37-6e446da687bd"

     AdUnitId="150628"

     Width="728"

     Height="90"

     Margin="0,0,0,0"

     HorizontalAlignment="Center"

     VerticalAlignment="Bottom" ErrorOccurred="AdControl_ErrorOccurred"/>

 private void AdControl_ErrorOccurred(object sender, Microsoft.Advertising.WinRT.UI.AdErrorEventArgs e)

        {

            Debug.WriteLine(String.Format("Spelling Champion Message  AdControl Error Exception: {0}; AdControl Error Code {1}", e.Error.Message, e.ErrorCode.ToString()));

        }

Then I run the app again, I got the exception.message as “No ad available” and the error code is NoAdAvailable.

Remember that the app still show ads, so “NoAdAvailable” is not true. 

This is my guess:

The Ads control fires HTTP calls to pull contents from Ads service. When certain call is not success, it throws Http exception.  But as long as some important pieces of information is collected, it will show the ads. This exception is either some kind of debugging info should be removed but not or this is a indication that something is wrong in MS Ads service/Coontrol.

I filed a ticket to MS, when I get response back I will post it here.