.NET | Issue | CSV export giving corrupted chars for non english characters Â

Someone asked me today about an encoding problem they were having, its amazing, encoding issues have been around since the beginning of computers, the requirement to export international data to files or pages and having the reader interpret the characters correctly is pretty common, I would go so far as to say that about half of every big projects has some form of requirement around that.

So then we come to why the issue shows up? "Ive debugged and can see the data from the database is being shown correctly but when i export it to the response, the special characters come back as gobbledygook, even the pound symbol is coming back as '£'"

what do you do?

1. Check the data in the database is stored correctly and it is getting to the response without being corrupted
2. Check you are setting the ContentEncoding correctly, what do you need to use? UTF8 is always a good one to use if you are unsure
3. Make sure you are using the right BOM (Byte Order Mark)! (this is nearly always the issue with unexplained chars with the correct encoding, see below

if you want to know more about BOM, have a look at this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

Creating a Clock App for Windows 8 with HTML/JS/CSS

Ok!, today we are going to create a basic windows 8 clock app, the idea is to use nothing but web technologies to get an app up and running

Windows 8 apps are perfect for dashboards, reporting and apps which are all inclusive, so I thought of making a basic one that shows a clock, its simple and shows the very basics of app dev

So lets get started!

Step 1: Open VS

Step 2: Click create, new project, Other languages, JavaScript, Blank App

Step 3: Enter your suitable project name

 Step 4: This now creates the standard project layout

Step 5: Lets change the metadata of the project so its more meaningful, the display name and the description

 Step 6: Now lets change the icon so it looks a bit snazzy, open the logo.png file and do whatever you like to it

Lets see how that looks!, press F5 then windows key, you can see the app as the last tile, ooooh shiny!

Step 7: In the default.html create a new div to hold the clock, give it a class, we want to do the same with the date so we can display some more information

Step 8: Now the magic, the JavaScript, open the JS file and add the following code, And viola, here we go!, press F5

 As you can see it’s a bit unstyled so lets change that

Step 10: Open the default.css, you can see the file is prefilled with the various states allowed so you just need to add your CSS within this, make sure to apply the styles for the other view states of the app

Now press F5!, its just like magic, here is your clock all, simple and beautiful

Now get that bad boy in TFS and published and your ready to go!