The attached file includes an application that I first wrote using VC6 and later translated to VB in VS2002. It's been a really helpful tool for me -- it allows you to translate back and forth between DBCS, UTF8, and Unicode, using both codepoints and raw characters. It supports surrogate characters and uses any fonts you have installed on your system. You can cut and paste as well. The code demonstrates the System.Globalization namespace, the System.Text.Encoding namespace, and also leverages Declare statements.

I describe the application in detail in my blog post at http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/archive/2007/03/08/making-your-vb-code-ready-to-go-global-matt-gertz.aspx.