Unable to run or deploy Windows App SDK Push Notification Sample from Microsoft learn.

Question

I'm trying to run the Microsoft Push Notifications sample taken from here to explore this capability on a Windows app. My setup composed of Azure Notification server, remote app to trigger the Notifications (Postman), and the client app.

Unfortunately, I ran into issues with both the packaged and unpackaged project variants.

For the packaged project, the Deploy option has completely disappeared from Visual Studio. Because of that, when I try to run the project directly, it fails and throws the following exception:

Unhandled exception at 0x00007FFD2B8C055C in cpp-console.exe: Microsoft C++ exception:
 winrt::hresult_class_not_registered at memory location 0x000000294034F3B0. 

this exception is thrown from this line:

throw hresult_class_not_registered(take_ownership_from_abi WINRT_IMPL_SOURCE_LOCATION_FORWARD);

For Unpackaged project, I get an error that the app cannot find a compatible Windows App runtime. I have several SDKs installed, including the latest and versions 1.5 through 1.7.

Here is the screenshot of the SDKs installed:

All NuGet packages with matching versions are installed as well. The app complains that it cannot find the SDK at runtime. I will attach a screenshot below.
what I have already tried is cleaning and rebuilding the solution, restarting Visual Studio, and re-cloning the sample, but the behavior remains the same.

Has anyone encountered this issue before?
Any suggestions on how to run this sample correctly would be appreciated. Step by step guidance would be great.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Hi Hagai Vinik ,

Looks like the issue isn’t with your code but with the Windows App Runtime version that your unpackaged app depends on.

The error dialog in your screenshot (“requires Windows App Runtime Version 1.5 (MSIX package ≥ 5001.58.448.0)”) means the runtime MSIX package for that version/architecture isn’t properly registered or doesn’t match your app’s bitness. Having the NuGet reference alone isn’t enough, the corresponding MSIX runtime must also be installed and match the app architecture.

My recommendation:

1. Check your app’s architecture (x64 or x86).
2. Run winget list "Windows App Runtime" and confirm you have the same version and bitness installed (for example, x64 runtime if the app is x64).
3. If not, uninstall all existing Windows App Runtime MSIX packages for that version, then reinstall the correct one from Microsoft’s official source:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/windows-app-sdk/downloads-archive

4. After reinstalling, restart Windows and run the app again.

If the dialog still appears, check Event Viewer → Windows Logs → Application for entries mentioning WinAppRuntime to confirm which version or architecture it’s trying to load.

Hope this helps!