*hypf*

It's fun somehow … I look for a very specific issue with .NET currently, namely how to get Unicode output on the console. Searching turns up the following (in decreasing order of frequency):

• copies of exactly one help message, posted to about a dozen different help forums (OK, maybe it was only posted to a few and automatically grabbed by others. I usually saw a „Register to see the answer“ below it which doesn't exactly raise my confidence in the quality of the answer.)
• questions asked by absolute beginners, answered and discussed by absolute beginners – this usually doesn't contain any useful information beyond mindless babble about codepages and how to set them systemwide to get the characters you want
• helpful advice by people who know something about it, like Michael Kaplan who basically said that the .NET console does not have Unicode

While the result does not please me that much (because I like Unicode and can't really stand applications that still live in 1960), what bothers me more is that there is so few helpful stuff on the web.

Now that I complain about it I have to admit, I read Joel Spolsky's blog as well as Jeff Atwood's. Both mentioned and founded stackoverflow­.com, for exactly the same reasons. Now I just need to remember that the site is there and go there instead of Google when I need help. Might take a while to change my habits there.

UPDATE (2008–10–26 00:48): I found out how to use Unicode on the .NET console: Just use UTF-8 as output encoding. I was so naïve to assume since .NET strings use UTF-16 and Win32 uses UTF-16 Console.Ou­tputEncoding should be UTF-16 as well. I was wrong and didn't even bother to try UTF-8.