In order to use UTF8 encoding in your DotKernel based system, is needed to make some changes in both database structure and in the application.ini file.
Those changes are commited into DotKernel 1.6.0 dev codebase, which will be released in next days.
Database
set for all tables and columns proper collation , either utf8_general_ci or utf8_binApplication.ini
add the line>database.params.charset = utf8to your application.ini file, in the area.