Cast to LPCWSTR?

Question

I'm trying to create a (very) simple Win32 GUI program, but for some reason the compiler (I'm using VC++ 2008 Express) wants me to manually typecast every string or char* to LPCWSTR:

I get this compiler error every time I do this, for example I get this error for the "Hello" and "Note":

error C2664: 'MessageBoxW' : cannot convert parameter 2 from 'const char [22]' to 'LPCWSTR'

Please tell me I don't have to cast every time I do this....

Here's the code:

#include <windows.h>

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, 
    LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
    MessageBox(NULL, "Hello", "Note", MB_OK);
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

The default for new projects in VS2008 is to build UNICODE aware applications. You can either change that default and go back to using ANSI or MBCS apps (Properties->Configuration Properties->General->Character Set), or use Unicode Strings like this:

int WINAPI WinMain(HINSTANCE hInstance, HINSTANCE hPrevInstance, 
    LPSTR lpCmdLine, int nCmdShow)
{
    MessageBox(NULL, L"Hello", L"Note", MB_OK);
    return 0;
}

Do not cast your strings to LPCWSTR because that will lead to undefined behavior! A char is not the same as a wchar_t!