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Finding exported templates in Visual Studio 2019

The problem: Exported project templates do not appear in the “new project” dialog

You’ve exported a project as a template. You’ve made sure that “automatically import the template into Visual studio” was checked:

Still, the template does not appear in the “new project” dialog.

Possible solution

Make sure you’ve not made any selection in the “language”, “platform” or “project type” dropdowns:

After clearing the C# language selection, the export template appears:

In Visual Studio 16.1.4, it was also not possible to enter the name of the template:

However, this seems to have been fixed (works in 16.4.1).

Inside the Omron D2FC-F-7N microswitch

When my ancient Logitech G500 mouse stopped working properly, I followed these helpful instructions to bring it back to life. Now I know more than I ever wanted to know about the mechanics inside the Omron D2FC-F-7N microswitch.

Here’s a short video I made showing how it should work:

Inside the Omron D2FC-F-7N Microswitch

Watch this video on YouTube

“10M” stands for 10 million operations. There’s apparently also a 20M version.

This is a photo of a working switch:

Working Omron D2FC-F-7N microswitch — The purple arrow points at the contact area that may require cleaning (opposite side as well). You do not necessarily have to remove the leaf spring to do this (I recommend leaving it in place). The green arrows point at the notches mentioned in the article linked above.

The following switches will not work as the leaf spring is not positioned correctly in one of the notches:

I recommend opening the switch from this side (compare label on your switch for orientation):

Opening Omron DSFC-F-7N microswitch — Just like me, you will most likely bend and dislocate the spring if you open the switch from the other end.

Finally, a photo with my finger shows why these are called microswitches (actually Omron uses the term “Ultra Sub Miniature Basic Switch”):

Omron DSFC-F-7N microswitch size — If you don’t like working with tiny parts you might be better off getting a new mouse.

Disclaimer: If your mouse has been in use for several years, you should seriously consider buying a replacement switch. I believe you could desolder the switch from the top by cutting it into pieces first (the plastic is rather soft). Replacements don’t seem to be available from electronic components distributors but are sold on Amazon.com (affiliate link).

I was only able to repair my mouse because I had another broken one from which I stole a leaf spring (from the less-used right switch). The original spring of the left switch in my mouse was badly deformed. Unfortunately I can’t show you any pictures because it flew away when I tried to bend it.

Driver for LogiLink AU0033 USB 2.0 to 8x Serial Adapter

You can download it here.

How I found it

I went to the product page on the LogiLink website, clicked on “Downloads”, then on the link to the driver which sent me to a 404 page on 2direct.de.

I then searched for the product directly on the 2direct.de website, found it here, clicked on “Downloads”, then on “Treiber AU0033” (Treiber is German for driver), which led to a PDF document that in turn contained the link to the actual driver ZIP file (which is hosted on the LogiLink website where I started).

Note if you’re reinstalling the driver

You can find an uninstaller under “Logilink AU0033 8x seriell\CD\Driver\Windows\64X\9710_7840_QUADPORT_MSUninst.exe”, running this before the installer fixed a problem on my system where only half of the ports would appear.

DeepL translator now available as desktop app

DeepL.com is currently the best AI translator* and is now available as an app for Windows and macOS. This means that users will no longer have to copy text back and forth between their application and the DeepL website:

Just like the website, the app is able to provide alternatives to the suggested translations and adapts the rest of the sentence, if necessary:

The limit of 5000 characters per translation can be lifted by signing up for a DeepL Pro plan.

Wondering why the download for Windows has an impressive size of 135 MB? This is mainly due to the use of the Chromium Embedded Framework, which is included both in a 32 bit and 64 bit version.

*Is the Deepl.com the best AI translator? I think so. Like everything on this blog, this is just my opinion. However, as someone living and working in Luxembourg, a country with three official languages, I sure appreciate DeepL.com a lot.

Alternative apps

QTranslate has been around for several years, is also available for free and integrates several different translation services (including DeepL):

It has additional features like image text recognition, text to speech synthesis and searching in online and offline dictionaries. However, it seems that it can only provide alternative translations for single words. The size of the download is less than 1 MB.

Reading the version from a ClickOnce .application file

ClickOnce .application files contain an assemblyIdentity element with a version attribute:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
...
  <assemblyIdentity name="Simple Data Logger.application" version="1.1.2.1" publicKeyToken="0c3a74e9157b5601" language="en" processorArchitecture="msil" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" />

An easy way to read this version string is:

var assembly = XElement.Load(uri);
XNamespace ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1";
remoteVersionString = assembly.Element(ns + "assemblyIdentity").Attribute("version").Value;

You can use this to create a Version object:

var version = new Version(remoteVersionString);

Note: The code above runs synchronously and blocks your application. To avoid this, you could run it in as a task on the thread pool with Task.Run() or you could use XElement.LoadAsync instead of XElement.Load(), if available.