What are those characters at the beginning of Visual Studio auto-generated files?
c#, visual-studio
Solution
This is a byte order marker (BOM). It is used to indicate the encoding of the file.
More info:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte-order_mark
Problem
When Visual Studio generates, e.g., a C# source file, if you edit it in an ASCII text editor, you'll see something that looks like the following character sequence:  Deleting these bytes doesn't seem to harm anything, but why are they put there in the first place?