I was able to track down the problem of the shaders not being saved in UTF-8 encoding, so if that's the problem for you, just load them in notepad and save them back again... I guess? Hopefully I will have the correct settings in Visual Studio so that when I save the shaders, folks on the other end won't have to implement this change if their system isn't already set up to save "appropriately".... anyways, there's that solution.