MySQL C# Text Encoding Problem

Solution:

<add key="MyDBConnectionString" value="Server=127.0.0.1;Database=posserver;Uid=root;Pwd=mypassword;Port=3306;CharSet=utf8;"/>

Note: Use lower case value utf8 and not upper case UTF8 as this will fail.
Note: that resultsets still are returned in the character set of the data returned.

http://www.connectionstrings.com/mysql/