Visual Studio 2015 - Advanced Save Options Encoding types missing

Question

I'm experiencing a very odd behaviour of my Visual Studio 2013 and 2015 installations on my Windows 10 x64 machine: they're not showing anymore the full "Advanced Save Options..." Encoding type list, which has been reduced to only 3 possible choices (see screenshot #1).

Screenshot 1:

The list is expecting to contain a largely wider selection of encoding types, including the UTF-8 without BOM which I'm using a lot: they're all available on the VS I installed on my laptop (Windows 8.1 x64, Visual Studio 2013, see screenshot #2).

Screenshot 2:

Anyone knows why this is happening and how to fix that? Thanks in advance.

EDIT: All these VS builds are Community Edition, including the one on the laptop (it shouldn't be related to the build - the CE always had these enctypes). The first screenshot's path has been scratched by me, it's showing fine in the GUI.

Forespent

Did you scratch out the file path in the first screenshot? It's not helpful to you but Enterprise 2015 in Win 7 x64 Enterprise is working correctly. I don't have community edition to test with. – Felicitation

Could you provide us the content of the file? Is this with just one particular file or do you experience the issue with multiple files? – Kabob

Answer 1

Visual Studio seems to use the IMultiLanguage2::EnumCodePages method to populate this combo box. Its second parameter is the language ID the caller wants the descriptions to be in and VS is passing 0x409 (US English), which I guess is its language version (it may be different when you use localized version of VS, but you don't seem to be doing that). The problem manifests itself in Windows 10 when you don't have US English language pack installed. Previous versions of Windows seem to contain the code page descriptions in every language (I've tried British English and Polish) but I guess Windows 10 is more thrifty with that and returns an empty enumeration when you call that method asking for descriptions in language it doesn't have an installed language pack for.

TL;DR Add the "English (United States)" language and install its associated language pack, either via Settings or Control Panel. You can also get the language pack DVD for offline installation with the lpksetup tool via MSDN subscription if you have one.

Kingdom

Installed the language pack, launched VS2015 and... it perfectly works now. You are the man, sir: many thanks for your perfect explanation and suggestion, this is why I love this place so much. – Forespent

We tried the same solution, but it looks like on the involved machines no language pack is available. We're thinking the Windows installations are broken and will replace them. Anyhow, it looks as if your solution works for some, so I granted the bounty. – Spracklen

@DaveVandenEynde I couldn't get the language pack via the "consumer route" (that is, just download it in the settings or control panel) either, as my Windows machine is on a domain with WSUS and I didn't want to deal with my admin - you should try the offline install method - get the language pack CAB somehow (I've got it from MSDN Subscriber downloads) and install it with lpksetup. – Kingdom