 company</a>, we decided to do everything internally in UCS-2 (two byte) Unicode, which is what Visual Basic, COM, and Windows NT/2000/XP use as their native string type. In C++ code we just declare strings as <strong>wchar_t</strong> ("wide char") instead of <strong>char</strong> and use the <strong>wcs</strong> functions instead of the <strong>str</strong> functions (for example <strong>wcscat</strong> and <strong>wcslen</strong> instead of <strong>strcat</strong> and <strong>strlen</strong>). To create a