Hi, I'm seeing warnings that a number of core stream and stream buffer member functions, such as 'read' and 'sgetn' are declared deprecated by VC8 beta 2. Maybe this is part of the push to promote 'safe' versions of functions which take character arrays as arguments; I can't check the standard library source code, because I gave up trying to install beta 2 after 3 tries. At any rate, it seems totally crazy. As far as I know, there's no proposal -- and no need -- to replace the core member functions responsible for unformatted i/o. Even if microsoft adds functions to replace the deprecated members, how is one supposed to write portable code? It seems like all non-trivial use of iostreams, and the Iostreams library in particular, will result in large numbers of warnings on this platform. Also, the iostreams test counter_test.cpp is failing with an "unkown" linker error. It would be very helpful to me if someone who has managed to install beta 2 would take a quick look to see what might be going wrong. Jonathan