Alexa Simulator "hangs" - alexa

I'm in my baby-steps in Alexa Skills development and I'm stuck in the testing part. It seems that the simulator just hangs. The bubbles wont go away and I dont get any some sort of a response. I made sure that the skill is configured using EN-US and that the Lambda function is hosted on US-East (N.Virgina). Not entirely sure what to do from here.

It took me 2 days to locate the issue. As it turns out ADGuard is doing more than it's suppose to do. I had it completely disabled yet the Simulator did not want to work. Only after killing it's process entirely did the Simulator finally start to work.

For me, I had stop fiddler running and it started working,
This was the error I was getting,
HTTP/1.0 200 This buggy server did not return headers

Related

Transform Classes With Dex For Debug is making Windows crash

I'm building a React Native app. Everything was working fine but now when I try to run on Android it gets to the task :app:transformClassesWithDexForDebug, it hangs for 30-60 seconds and then Windows shuts down.
I tried to setup multidex as mentioned here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/56875424 but the result is the same.
I'm not getting any error message, the computer just shuts down abruptly and I have to turn it on again.
Any advice is much appreciated.
In the end, it was two problems mixed:
I was using the new Windows Terminal which is still in beta so I guess the shutdown problem was something to do with it, because I changed to normal good ol' cmd and the shutdown problem disappeared.
The actual error in the compilation process was actually the setup of multidex. I was not extending the MultiDexApplication class.
Thank you all.

Alexa skill in java not waiting for response

I'm trying the WiseGuy sample app in Java and can get Alexa to say "knock knock" but then the light turns off and that's it, I don't get to say "who's there".
Same issue with my own skill, even though I'm using newAskResponse(). Is there anything else I need to do?
Thanks!
Etienne
Fixed it by using the jar file produced by Maven instead of directly using the source code. Not sure why that makes a difference.
When you face issues like this, don't forget, you can use the skill configuration "Test" tab, to test the skill, to make sure it's not an interpretation problem (which can happen often).
Also, if doing that still gives you a response that you are not expecting you can copy that intent request:
And that past it on your lambda function event Test, there you will be able to see a more detail "debug" and if you are still not sure, make sure you do a few prints to at least pin point where the issue is:)

How do you debug Share Picker extensions?

I have registered my Phone 7 app as a Share Picker Extension. It works—my app is in the list of Share options and it gets launched and I can load the chosen image. Okay, great.
But then things go wrong in my code. I would like to be able to debug the issues, but I can't seem to keep the debugger attached.
I cannot debug this in the simulator, since the Pictures app (and thus the Share Picker functionality) is not present in the simulator.
I cannot debug this on the phone because as soon as I pick my app from the Share list, the debugger detaches... right as my app is "launching" again.
Is it possible to attach the debugger to a running WP7 app? Is it possible to keep the debugger attached? Am I doing it wrong? Any suggestions, advice or guesses are welcome because I'm tearing my hair out.
When doing M+V hub integration (sorry, haven't done any pictures hub integration yet) I initially used a crude debug technique (Messagebox.Show, etc. - like Justin mentioned) to verify what was being passed to the NavigationEventArgs of OnNavigatedTo and wrapped the whole method in a try..catch block to learn what was going on. I then refactored the code when I knew what could be expected. (Remember OnNavigatedTo will be called when your app is launched normally too and so e won't be populated in the same way.)
When the app is launched from a/the hub it creates a new instance of the app and there is currently no way to connect to this for debugging while the main page is being navigated to.
Great question. I'm unsure if that's possible. As far as I know, there's no way to attach the debugger to when the WP7 O/S starts an app (which wasn't triggered by the debugger).
Photo Share picker extensibility, music+Video hub extensibility and other O/S extensibility points seem to not play nicely with the VS debugger. Normally I resort to MessageBox.Show to debug any problems with WP7 O/S integration.
1) Connect the Device
2) Turn off Zune
3) Start C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect\x86\WPConnect.exe
To properly debug your application that uses the Media Library, you'll need to use the Windows Phone Connect Tool (WPConnect.exe) as described on MSDN. Jaime has some additional tips on his blog.
Once you are connected, you should be able to debug your application. Fingers crossed anyway. If that doesn't help, I'll dig a bit further.
It's not so much about the WPConnect tool. The nature of your application means that you have to have it closed and the user should pick a photo. Only after that the data is returned to the application.
You should read about the application execution model on Windows Phone 7. Also a good explanation is available here.
Initially, I would say that you should look at tombstoning (a good explanation here) but then again, the image returned will re-start the app and won't allow you to directly attach the debugger.
Yeah, looks like this is impossible...
All the answers above seem to be missing the point: I presume you're able to debug your app in the "standalone" mode (when it's launched normally), but not when it's launched via the Share Picker Extension. Am I write? This is the wall I'm hitting... :-(
I thought the proper way would be to attach to the process once it's launched.
I tried to use Debug > Attach to Process, then select Smart Device as the Transport and Windows Phone Device as the Qualifier... But in return I get the ugly "Unable to connect to 'Windows Phone Device'. Not implemented" message.
Bummer :-(

What could be causing my WP7 app to crash on only some models?

I've been working on this problem on and off for about a month. I don't expect anybody to be able to give me a definitive answer. I'm just completely out of ideas at this point and could use anything.
The problem is that my app crashes on only some models of phones. I have an HTC surround and it runs fine. It has also been tested on a Samsung Focus and it works there to. It crashes pretty consistently on a HTC mozart. There are other phones it crashes on but I don't know what models they are. I don't have access to an HTC mozart so debugging has been very difficult.
I'm handling the application UnhandledException event and I have try catch around every background thread. The error handling code never runs.
What I know:
Sometimes it freezes and requires a press of the power button. At least once it required the battery taken out. Most of the time it freezes and then crashes.
Most of the time it crashes on the main menu, before everything displays.
It's not 100% consistent. Sometimes it works for a little bit, but never very long.
It's not because it's out of memory. Most of the time it crashes while using less then 8MB.
When all the exception handling didn't work I added debug logging. This slows things way down but at the same time the issue goes away.
These symptoms make it sound like a deadlock to me. Although I have gone over the code and there is no thread ever entering more then 1 lock at a time.
Any ideas on how I should track this down would be appreciated.
Edit: This is a WP7 version of my game. I've just been able to confirm with a volunteer with an HTC mozart that the simplest conversion of the code meant for to run on the web will crash on the phone. That's code has no networking, isolated storage, or sound.
I also should have mentioned that this has passed certification and was in the marketplace for a few days until I took it down because it got bad reviews (because it was unplayable for some people)
If the devices are locking up, then my suspicions would be to look at the areas where you are closest to the driver level/hardware, which (looking at your game) are:
the display
the sound
It could also be just about due to processing/CPU activity - but generally "User level" code shouldn't be able to lock up your phone - that functionality is reserved for kernel software.
The only way of really testing this is to get hold of a device where this "reliably crashes" (e.g. a Mozart) and to go through the process of disabling bits of functionality one by one.
If this is a Silverlight app, then I'd expect Microsoft to want to help - I'd contact them via AppHub and via their local Evangelist team - they'll have the means and the motivation to assist you.
I'm happy to assist on testing on a developer-unlocked HTC Trophy if that helps!
The only thing I can think of that's unique to the Mozart is that it has an 8MP camera and all others have a 5MP camera.
Are you using a CameraCaptureTask and expecting the returned image to be a certain size?
Other than that, what does the app do? what services and device functionality are you using?
Do you have any network access running on a background thread?
I had roughly the same problem when developing my WP7 app. As far as I can tell it isn't as much model bound as it is device bound. In fact I had my app deployed to 15+ Trophy's (my company gave all their employees one of those) and it would repeatedly crash on some of them all having the same firmware. Some of the feedback I got through the reviews seems to indicate that it also happens in the wild.
In my case the crash occurs primarily (only?) when the app is launched. There does seem to be a strong correlation between internet connectivity and crashing in that I can 'recreate' the crash by putting my phone in flight mode, unplugging the network cable from my computer and then deploying the app. In that case too it immediately crashes and no event or break point is ever raised.
My gut feeling tell me it might have something to do with the map control as that does tend to respond funky to poor connectivity when the application is loading (like displaying an error message that the card cant be loaded while simultaneously displaying the map)
Does your app also use the Map Control (in combination with a Pivot control perhaps?)
Some of the devices have issues where you need set things to "content" instead of "embedded resource" in your project.
Although i've more heard about that issue related to app startup time, as on some devices (HD7?) the load of the app was taking enough time that the app was never allowed to start, the OS thought it was taking too long and killed it.

Debugging Silverlight applications with IE9 beta

I spent some time debugging a SL3 application with VS 2010 in IE9 beta today and noticed a few quirks. Sometimes when launching the Silverlight app in VS it fails to load in the browser, but refreshing with F5 tends to fix the problem. Also, there are sporadic scripting errors that pop up a debug dialog - these also seem to be fixed by refreshing the page. Has anyone run into these problems and found a fix?
EDIT: My most prevalent error is:
Error: ASP.NET Ajax client-side framework failed to load.
I don't understand why, but someone without a name at the Silverlight forums has found a solution that worked for me:
Just add or uncomment this entry to your hosts file (%SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts):
127.0.0.1 localhost
I noticed this as well with Silverlight 4, but also when I start a simple web project.
IE9 has a shorter startup time that IE8. Debugging a Silverlight application starts the development web server to host the http:// site. The time that it took to start up the web server was less than the time to start up IE8 and greater than the time it takes to start up IE9.
#Michael S. Scherotter - It can't be because of the shorter startup time because making the host file change which fixed it for me would have zero impact on app startup time. Something else must be causing the browser and Cassini to not talk to each other correctly.
One other fix, related to the others is to change the StartURL to launch to the loop back address directly, rather than editing the hosts file. So, in one app, I've got this as the start URL:
http://127.0.0.1.:60525/
Of course, to make this work consistently, I've selected a "specific port" in configuration, as 60525 in this case.
(the trailing . after the loop back address is to allow Fiddler to do its magic).

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