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MSI, WiX and Unicode

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World-readiness in a product tends to be much easier to handle using Unicode than it is with ANSI/OEM codepages.

 

WiX (and MSI) require specifying a codepage for the project. I tried using codepage 1200 (UTF-16 LE) in my project and WiX produced error LGHT0040: Codepage "1200" is not a valid codepage.

 

After some digging, I found this information indicating that Unicode support in MSI is "unofficial" and seems to include only UTF-8 (65001) and UTF-7 (65000). I wonder why 1200, 1201, 12000 and 12001 are not in the list.

 

Anyway, 65001 is a nice number. It reminds me of the CPU where I learnt assembly programming :)