I was tearing my hair out, trying to figure out why my .fx file wasn’t compiling with fxc.
Eventually I figured out that if I saved the .fx file with a text editor (TextPad), fxc would just work … (previously I was saving this file using Visual Studio).
Ok, by chance I ran across Pavan Podila’s post on the matter. Ah, that’s why!
Apparently, the default encoding for text files is Unicode (UTF-8 with signature) – Codepage 65001 … and apparently fxc doesn’t compile .fx files if they have his encoding.
Argh! Wish I had seen that post sooner.
Some good news on the matter, however, is that the Visual Studio templates that Greg Schechter has posted on his blog … set the encoding to Western European (Windows) – Codepage 1252 … which does compile.
So, if you use these templates, you won’t have to think about it … which is a good thing.