CharacterTranscoder is a BizTalk pipeline component + stream class that can transcode a stream from a configurable source encoding to a configurable target encoding. The source is now available on github.com. Git takes some time to get used to. I managed to put something online somehow, which means everybody should be able to :-) Microsoft also offered a free support case for the FFASM bug and the behavior is already reproduced at their side. Nice ......