I'm currently doing some work on looking into producing a localised version of a Madgex job board (not dis-similar to the work I did this time last year)and am mainly looking at the SQL Server and javascript areas whilst a colleague looks at the .NET side. Glenn gave me a tip off that when he'd been doing something similar, he'd had problems with Visual Studio 2005 not saving his javascript files as UTF.

So, within VS2005 I created a javascript file and put 2 lines into it. They were simply:
alert ('hello world');
alert('Zarys gramatyki por¢wnawczej jezyk¢w slowianskich');

I then linked this into a (very) basic HTML page

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
  <title>i18n</title>
  <script type="text/javascript" src="js/i18n.js" language="javascript"></script>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

so that on pageload 2 alert boxes are displayed, one saying 'Hello World' and the one saying 'Zarys gramatyki por¢wnawczej jezyk¢w slowianskich'.

Unfortunately what is displayed instead is:

Media_httpfarm4static_enrfh

which isn't exactly what I had in mind.

I opened the file in Notepad++ (my text editor of choice) to take a look at the file type and it is, as I'd expected, saved as ANSI, not UTF-8 or UTF-16

Media_httpfarm4static_ajbcb

I used Notepad++'s menu item Format -> Convert to UTF-8 to convert this file from ANSI into UTF-8, and then re-ran my test and all works correctly as expected. Hurrah!

I then repeated this using VS2008 and found that this is one of the fixes over VS2005.

So, the alert now correctly displays:

Media_httpfarm4static_ljccv

and when opened in Notepad++ the file is now, correctly, UTF-8.
Media_httpfarm4static_ksfwy