PocketMatrix

Good point. I guess if that's a situation you want to avoid you could just have a char[x] area, and manually fill that in with your strings. I suppose there's something like Java's StringTokenizer that could allow you re-constitute the strings on read?

To what kind of string are you referring? Certainly a straight char[] doesn't have a 256 character limit, and I don't think a TCHAR does (am I wrong anyone?). I'd be surprised if CString had such a limit, although I don't know.

If you are going to use structures like fzammetti suggested then just be careful of alignment issues. I had some trouble that only gave access violations on Dell Axims to do with not having correctly aligned structures. Generally I just put the 32bit values first and the 1byte values at the end.