The free apps I had in the marketplace were running Google’s Admob as adprovider because when I wrote the apps Microsoft Pubcenter wasn’t available in the Netherlands yet. When I was upgrading my Apps to Mango I found out that version 4.0.4 that is currently the latest release of the Windows Phone Admob SDK is broken will always give you exceptions when you include this control. Seeing Google wasn’t to keen on fixing this since it was mentioned a lot in admob sdk Google groups I decided to switch to Microsoft Pubcenter because it came available for Dutch people.
Implementing the control is easy by just installing the SDK, create an account, adding the control to your page and filling in the applicationid and the adunitid. if you still need a guide this one explains all the details:
So the control is added to the page and you’re ready to go. If you followed all the instructions the ads should show up fine. Not for you?
I had the same problem when I was testing my application. I did most of my testing in the emulator and the ads would show up fine right there. When I started testing on my phone I noticed that only the ad placeholder was shown for really short time and after that the ad was hidden. Trying to find out what the differences could be between my phone and the emulator my first thoughts were the Culture of the phone since my phone is running in Dutch Culture nl-NL and the emulator is running en-US by default. When I switched the culture on the emulator to being Dutch the ads also stop showing there.
So what is the problem and how did I fix it?
The Pubcenter Adcontrol has a nice event called “ErrorOccured” and you can subscribe to this event to see what is happening. (or just attach the debugger and set it to break on exceptions)
1: public MainPage()
2: {
3: InitializeComponent();
4: adcontrol.ErrorOccurred += new EventHandler<Microsoft.Advertising.AdErrorEventArgs>(adcontrol_ErrorOccurred);
5: }
6:
7: void adcontrol_ErrorOccurred(object sender, Microsoft.Advertising.AdErrorEventArgs e)
8: {
9: }
In the adcontrol_ErrorOccurred eventhandler you can log your error the adcontrol is throwing or handle it the way you want to. The error I kept getting when using the Dutch Culture was:
Microsoft.Advertising.Mobile.Shared.AdException – No ad available.
My guess was that this was happening because there aren’t any Dutch ads yet so I tried to change the settings of the adcontrol by changing the CountryOrRegion, Language and even the Latitude and Longitude attributes to somewhere in the United States but this doesn’t help. I made a ticket at the Pubcenter helpdesk and they told me a new algorithm just went live and it can be that there aren’t to many ads yet so it’s possible to get a disappearing ad control once in a while when you’re running less common cultures. Trying to change the country or culture DOES NOT WORK so you’ll just have to wait (It’s not like Admob is a better alternative since that one isn’t working at all)
I would encourage everyone to just leave the ad in and the requests to the Pubcenter servers will show that there is a lot of space for ads to be sold so advertisers will jump in and use this space.
Nokia seems the first to jump in because the last few days I seem to receive Nokia Lumia ads when using a Dutch culture 
Oh btw this method also works when you’re having other issues with your ad control ofcourse. just check the exception to see what’s going on. The one thing I keep forgetting every time I add the AdControl are the capabilities in the WMAppManifest.xml. when you do this you’ll get another AdException:
Microsoft.Advertising.Mobile.Shared.AdException – Required capabilities are missing from manifest (WMAppManifest.xml): ID_CAP_NETWORKING, ID_CAP_PHONEDIALER, ID_CAP_IDENTITY_USER, ID_CAP_MEDIALIB, ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT.
Geert van der Cruijsen
(within 5 minutes after i first touched it).