A new post from the Visual C++ team about how VC++ has evolved in the past for supporting different characters sets, and what's new:

New Options for Managing Character Sets in the Microsoft C/C++ Compiler

by Jim Springfield

From the article:

The Microsoft C/C++ compiler has evolved along with DOS, 16-bit Windows, and 32/64-bit Windows.  Its support for different characters sets, code pages, and Unicode has also changed during this time...