Visual Studio 2013 produces garbled/corrupted/wrong-encoded html

Question

I have a MVC4 Web project with Razor, which works fine in VS2012. In VS2013, after clean-rebuild, the same web project produce html with encoding issues. its looks like this. Lots of ��� (question mark characters in a dark diamond)

I am pretty sure its VS2013 that is the cause - I have tried re-installing IIS, recreating the websites, disabling gzip compression, disabling caching, deleting temporary compiled files etc etc etc... I am using VS2013 Pro Edition in Windows 8.1.

If I switch back to VS2012 and clean-rebuild the response is back to normal.

I have also tried the <globalization> element in project, and meta Content-Type and same with http headers, various combinations of content type values etc, to fix encoding in VS2013 - all to no effect.

Any solutions?

Answer 1

Could be the Browser Link feature in VS 2013. Look for this in your toolbar:

Uncheck Enable Browser Link and reload the web page (rebuild shouldn't be necessary).

I figured this out noticing a bunch of requests like http://localhost:64667/613318d74fb54ab5bed269c36eb39fde/arterySignalR/connect... in Fiddler that I had never seen before. Also, using the Raw tab of the inspector in Fiddler showed lots of random unprintable bytes being injected into the HTML of my web pages.

Answer 2

Browser Link can also be disabled via web.config, as follows:

<configuration>
  <appSettings>
    <add key="vs:EnableBrowserLink" value="false" />
  </appSettings>
</configuration>