Question: We have several applications written in Visual Studio 2005 that are deployed onto our servers. If we deploy applications written in Visual Studio 2008 on the same server will it cause DLL conflicts?

We want to ensure that upgrading our version of Visual Studios will not break existing applications.

Thank you.

Answer: 
Well `BufferedWriter` and `BufferedReader` are encoding agnostic - they never deal with the actual encodings, as they're just buffering existing readers and writers.

Now `FileWriter` and `FileReader` use the default system encoding (urgh). To work round this, you should usually use an `InputStream` / `InputStreamReader` or `OutputStream` / `OutputStreamWriter` pair (possibly wrapped in a `BufferedReader` / `BufferedWriter`), and specify the encoding explicitly.

You haven't said what you're actually reading from - is it a file? Do you know the encoding of the file?
You should either know the encoding if you're going to treat the content as text (String), or, when copying is your goal, or treat the content as a byte array.