Microsoft® .NET Compact Framework (Core Reference)

Character Encoding

The .NET Compact Framework uses Unicode internally to represent character data. Unicode is a useful way to store character data because it provides a way to identify the characters used in any language in the world. You can use encoding to map Unicode characters to other character representations, which can be useful if your application must provide character data as an array of bytes specific to a code page such as ASCII or Windows-1252.

You can use the GetEncoding static method of the Encoding class to create an Encoding object for a specific code page. The Encoding class is defined in the System.Text namespace. The Encoding class provides the GetBytes method, which can be used to convert Unicode data to a code page–specific ...