I was going through the SharePoint App model and decided to publish a test app to get a feel of the deployment process. I was directly deploying the app through Visual Studio when suddenly the following error message was prompted:

When I tried to browse the app from the Site Contents, I could clearly see that the default styling of the page was somehow distorted. Browser’s console window was displaying this message, “RegisterSod is not defined“.

After investigating the issue a bit I realized, that for this to work, we need to have a root site collection in the  current web application i.e., where we’re supposed to deploy the app. For instance, I was deploying the app to the URL, dktp-piyush:48694/sites/pkDeveloperSite1 which was not a root site collection. When I checked, I found that actually, my web application didn’t had a root site collection. I then went ahead and created a root site collection. For those of you who do not know, root site collection is the one whose URL will be, / (forward slash).

Once, the root site collection was created, I just had to refresh the home page of my app and everything was back to normal. [No error in the Console] 😎

As I said, it was just a test app, which apparently did nothing (except for printing the current user’s login name). So all this, was just to get to the, blank white page of my app! 😉