Did you know you can make a Windows Win32 application use UTF-8 for char* strings? Did you think it had to be WCHAR for all that? Well Microsoft made some changes. It’s not even a big change to make, you just need to add this application manifest and you’re done! Your main copdepage will now be UTF-8 and your char* and std::strings will be able to hold Unicode characters. You can then call the A versions of functions instead of W and get all the benefits of UNICODE, for instance MessageBoxA() instead of MessageBoxW().