This is where we run into a little bit of a problem. You have a char pointer that can be either a multiple byte encoded (depending on the code page window is using). It also can be UTF-8 encoded. Then when you move onto windows wchar_t that is originally defined as (UCS-2) then was later renamed to UTF-16, due to surrogate pair's.
So in the windows world with COM/DCOM you're basically nugged into using UTF-16 wchar_t or it becomes a hell of a lot of pain. So it is easier just simply to accept to use UTF-16 and do all the conversion from UTF-8, UTF-32, code pages to a single encoding standard.
