title: Difference between MBCS and UTF-8 on Windows
body: <p>I am reading about the charater set and encodings on Windows. I noticed that there are two compiler flags in Visual Studio compiler (for C++) called MBCS and UNICODE. What is the difference between them ? What I am not getting is how UTF-8 is conceptually different from a MBCS encoding ? Also, I found the following quote in <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cwe8bzh0%28VS.80%29.aspx" rel="noreferrer">MSDN</a>:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Unicode is a 16-bit character encoding</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>This negates whatever I read about the Unicode. I thought unicode can be encoded with different encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16. Can somebody shed some more light on this confusion?</p>