Hi, Boost is a really neat idea, I wish I had less trouble using it (so embarrasing...). Anyway, here's a streambuf class I wrote using IOStream : class CrIPCStreamOutput : public sink { public: CrIPCStreamOutput(RU8 * pio_pInputStorage , RS32 & pio_nStorageLen) : m_pBuffer(pio_pInputStorage), m_nBufferLen(pio_nStorageLen) { } virtual ~CrIPCStreamOutput() { } void write(const char * s , std::streamsize n) { if(!m_pBuffer) { m_nBufferLen = -1; return; } memcpy(m_pBuffer , s , n); m_nBufferLen = n; return; } private: unsigned char *& m_pBuffer; int & m_nBufferLen; }; In my main, I do: int main() { unsigned char p[256] = {0}; int n = sizeof(p); streambuf_facade<CrIPCStreamOutput> sbo(CrIPCStreamOutput(p , n)); //stream_facade<CrIPCStreamOutput> stro(CrIPCStreamOutput(p , n)); iostream stro(&sbo); stro.write("Hello?" , 6); cout << p << endl; return 0; } But the ouput from cout is an empty string, although when debugging I can see m_pBuffer being copied to. How can I get this to work? The motivation for the whole thing is serialization: I want to serialize a class using the boos.serialization lib, for which I need a stream, which has to have certain properties (not shown here). I need to have the archiver write to a specific buffer. IOStreams should do it (I got the reading side working fine), but how? Thanks.