Borland StarTeam seems to store its data as UTF-8 encoded data in VarChar fields. I have an ASP.NET MVC site that returns some custom HTML reports using the StarTeam database, and I would like to find a better solution for getting the correct data, for a rewrite with MVC2. I tried a few things with Encoding GetBytes and GetString, but I couldn't get it to work (we use mostly Delphi at work); then I figured out a T-SQL function to return a NVarChar from UTF-8 stored in a VarChar, and created new SQL views which return the data as NVarChar, but it's slow. The actual problem appears like this: “description†instead of “description”, in both SSMS and in a webpage when using Linq2SQL Is there a way to get the proper data out of these fields using Entity Framework or Linq2SQL?