MessageBox comes in two flavors.... MessageBoxA and MessageBoxW, the A stands for ASCII and the W stand for wide-char or Unicode. Hold your mouse over the MessageBox function and Intellisense should display MessageBoxW, this is because based on the settings of the compiler it uses MessageBoxW by default. I figured it would be better if you learn this now since almost all Windows API functions come in these two flavors, ASCII supporting the English typeset and Unicode supporting an international typeset including english characters. So either change your compiler settings or Use the MessageBoxA since it will support cstrings a.k.a. ASCII strings a.k.a. char*