For users of Visual Studio that uses the Harvest SCM plugin, we have found that many users
inadvertently create project files in Unicode UTF16 format which is incompatible for checking in
these files into Harvest SCM as text files. If the check in attempt is made then no error message
popup is displayed, however in the Harvest SCM output pane at the bottom of the IDE, you may
find an entry that informs that the file in question contains a non-ascii text character.
Harvest currently only supports up to Unicode UTF8 and treats them the same as ascii text files.
There are a few workarounds to mitigate this problem and one is to set all files as binary files in
the administrator GUI. The downside to this is the your company would have to procure a third
party program such as BeyondCompare etc. that can perform comparisons and merges of binary
files. Another workaround is to open the file in windows notepad and save the file in "ANSI" format
then reattempt to add or check in the file to Harvest SCM repository.
If setting all files as binary in the administrator GUI is not a viable option then the best course of
action would be to first identify any files within your project for Unicode or non-ascii signatures and
use the notepad correction prior to check in attempts.
For this effort, I have provided a windows utility called "FileScanner.exe" that you can use to scan
your project directory recursively and it will provide a list of files that has the extension you wish to
scan and it discovers a Unicode signature. While the list is populating in the utility, you can double
click or r-click on a file list item to view the file in HexViewer (provided by the FileScanner install) and
it will go to the offending Unicode signature character.
Here is a screenshot of the FileScanner utility in action, I have set the directory to scan and also
entered the file extensions to scan only and to check for the Unicode signatures by checking the
proper checkboxes:
As you can see, you can select a file item then r-click on the item to open a popup menu and
select the HexViewer to see where the FF FE code was found:
Attached is the utility zip file that contain the self extracting install executable. If you wish to uninstall
the utility, you can uninstall it using the standard windows uninstall applet. The install requires the
VS2008 Microsoft x86 redistributals, so it will also install these components as part of the complete
installation. You must run the install as the system administrator privileges.