Error: DEP0700: Registration of the App Failed

You developed or are in the process of developing a Windows 8 Metro app.  It has been compiling without error for a while now.  Good for you.  All of a sudden – BAM!  Your app throws the following build error out of nowhere:

What just happened?  I would not know the specifics in your case, but somehow your local package folder became un-writable.  And because your deployment could not write to your local folder, it crashed.

There are a couple of ways to resolve this.  One way is to simply delete your local package folder and rebuild.  But I found an easy and painless solution. 

In the Package.AppManifest designer, in the Packaging tab, you can make a minor tweak to your Package name.  In my example I simply append the suffix “2” to the existing package name.  

What renaming your package name does is that it forces Windows to create a new local folder for your application – a new folder that does not have the write access restrictions that your old package had.

To recap:  Windows 8 creates a local folder for your package.  If write access to this folder is somehow denied, your package will fail to deploy.  To work around this, you can simply rename your package in the Packaging tab of the Package.AppManifest designer.