A coworker of mine was having trouble getting a batch file to run as part of the Azure startup process. He needed to do some kind of config to the environment.
The batch file worked if he rdp’d to the machine but failed on deploy.
When we opened the file in notepad it started with three unexpected characters.
This was the BOF unicode header, a piece of nonsense that identifies the file as being unicode, but breaks a lot of older technology that tries to use it.
Hint to microsoft: either implement transparent bypass of BOF header everywhere or stop using it.
It was an easy to save the file as UTF without the BOH header.
Developer Rants 