No Apps Currently available, office for apps using Azure Web Site and office 365

Question

I am trying to deploy and use an app for office. I created a simple Apps for Office project in Visual Studio 2013 and I deployed the web project to an Azure Web Site.

I changed the SourceLocation of the Manifest file to point to https://myAzureWebSite/app/home/home.html and I followed this article to deploy the app project to the Apps for Office list in my App Catalog site collection which I created it in my Developer tenant in Office 365. https://msdn.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/office/fp123517(v=office.15).aspx.

I have trusted my app catalog by going to Excel -> File -> Options -> Trust Center -> Trust Center Settings -> add url of the app catalog site collection and clicked ok.

I have reopened the excel file and go to Insert -> My apps -> My Organization but it shows No Apps currently available

Answer 1

Ensure that the Office application is able to connect and authenticate to the App Catalog in order to download the list (e.g., with Fiddler free web debugging proxy by Telerik). Enabling Anonymous access to the entire site would be a good troubleshooting step for this as well.

Additionally, there are some compatibility issues that could be preventing the SharePoint-based app catalog from correctly reading and storing the app manifests (although the app itself may be compatible with Office*).

For example: Apps created in Visual Studio 2015 CTP generate a manifest with schema 1.1 -- these will not be compatible with pre-SP1 installations of SharePoint 2013. Within the Apps for Office library, if you do not see the App Version, ID, or Default Locale listed for your App (and despite seeing Yes for Is Valid), this is likely the case. If you are monitoring the web traffic, you would also notice in the XML returned to Office that, for each list item, all properties are null.

App Manifest (notice appforoffice/1.1):

<OfficeApp xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/appforoffice/1.1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:type="TaskPaneApp">

XML returned to Office:

<d:OETitle m:null="true" />
<d:OEDisplayNameXML m:null="true" />
<d:OEID m:null="true" />
<d:OEVersion m:null="true" />
<d:OEDescription m:null="true" />
<d:OEDescriptionXML m:null="true" />
<d:OEDefaultHeight m:type="Edm.Int32">32</d:OEDefaultHeight>
<d:OEDefaultWidth m:type="Edm.Int32">32</d:OEDefaultWidth>
<d:OEDefaultLocale m:null="true" />
<d:OERevoked m:type="Edm.Boolean">false</d:OERevoked>
<d:OEAppInstanceID m:null="true" />
<d:OECapabilitiesXML m:null="true" />
<d:OEProductID m:null="true" />
<d:OEDefaultIconURL m:null="true" />
<d:OEIconURLXML m:null="true" />
<d:OEType>TaskPaneApp</d:OEType>
<d:OEProviderName m:null="true" />
<d:OETargetLanguagesXML m:null="true" />

*You can test App<-->Office compatibly directly by setting up a network share and hosting your app manifests there instead of on SharePoint (same set up required through Trust Center).