Why is my Delphi 2010 resource dll file ANSI Encoded - delphi

Question

I used the Resource DLL Wizard in Delphi 2010 to generate resource only dll's for my program. When I look at them using Notepad++ it seems they are using ANSI encoding. Is there some setting I missed? It doesn't seem like a unicode program should store it's resources in ANSI especially for Asian languages.
I was looking specifically at the TABOUTBOX RT_RCDATA record. I tried to load it using the following code,
procedure LoadFromResFile(const FileName: string);
var
LibHandle: THandle;
ResourceLocation: HRSRC;
ResourceSize: dword;
ResourceHandle: THandle;
ResourcePointer: pointer;
ResStr: string;
begin
LibHandle := LoadLibraryEx(PWideChar(FileName), 0, LOAD_LIBRARY_AS_DATAFILE or LOAD_LIBRARY_AS_IMAGE_RESOURCE);
if LibHandle > 0 then
begin
ResourceLocation := FindResource(LibHandle, 'TABOUTBOX', RT_RCDATA);
ResourceSize := SizeofResource(LibHandle, ResourceLocation);
ResourceHandle := LoadResource(LibHandle, ResourceLocation);
ResourcePointer := LockResource(ResourceHandle);
if ResourcePointer <> nil then
begin
SetLength(ResStr, ResourceSize);
CopyMemory(#ResStr[1], ResourcePointer, ResourceSize);
FreeResource(ResourceHandle);
end;
FreeLibrary(LibHandle);
end else
begin
ResStr := SysErrorMessage(GetLastError);
ShowMessage(ResStr);
end;
I got garbage, but when I changed the type of ResStr to AnsiString, it showed up correctly. Opening the file in Notepad++ I can see that the dialog resources appear to be ansi, including the label captions.

Answer 1

The Resource DLL wizard creates RCDATA resources for localized DFMs. The RCDATA resource named TABOUTBOX is a binary DFM resource. String values stored within a DFM (component names, captions, etc) are encoded using UTF8 in modern Delphi versions, including 2010. But the DFM data itself is binary in nature, it represents the complete structure of serialized components. It is not itself Unicode data, so you can't load it as-is into a UnicodeString (it "works" when you change ResStr to an AnsiString, but only because of its 8bit nature). DFM resources are meant for TForm/TDataModule/TFrame-derived classes (in this case, TAboutBox) to load and de-serialize at runtime.
If you want to view a DFM resource as human-readible text, you have to use the ObjectBinaryToText() or ObjectResourceToText() function to decode it. For example:
var
LibHandle: THandle;
ResStrm: TResourceStream;
StrStrm: TStringStream;
ResStr: string;
begin
LibHandle := LoadLibraryEx(PChar(FileName), 0, LOAD_LIBRARY_AS_DATAFILE or LOAD_LIBRARY_AS_IMAGE_RESOURCE);
if LibHandle > 0 then
begin
try
ResStrm := TResourceStream.Create(LibHandle, 'TABOUTBOX', RT_RCDATA);
try
StrStrm := TStringStream.Create;
try
ObjectBinaryToText(ResStrm, StrStrm);
StrStrm.Position := 0;
ResStr := StrmStrm.DataString;
finally
StrStrm.Free;
end;
finally
ResStrm.Free;
end;
finally
FreeLibrary(LibHandle);
end;
end else
begin
ResStr := SysErrorMessage(GetLastError);
end;
ShowMessage(ResStr);
end;