Thanks for the detailed answer. Maybe I was not precise enough in describing
the problem. My app (VB.NET/VS2010) uses external datasources (data from cd and a webservice)
which return string coded in (I believe) 1252. when I display or save these strings in my vb-programm
all special german or french characters (like öäü or ß) are lost. And i believe this happens because these
data is encoded on !251 and must betransformed to UTF?

Best regards

Thomas