Dear Robert Ramey , Here is a new boost user ( but an 'old' c++ programmer ) writting to you. Now , with several painful night , my test code of serialization lib has't run. OK , as some letter in the list , I meet the link problem. The libs has been compiled and linked with bjam correctly,and the lib files have been copied to the right position.But the compiler complained there are some symbol not resolved. I have inspected the source code,and find the serialization use some file in the [[archive]] dir. And in the docs, there are no any info about archive. It seems that archive is not an independent lib(bjam not compile the archive files,but copy the header file to the destination dir). Some classes in the archive are used by Serialization, but the implementation of these classes are not processed by bjam,so these class excite link errors(not compile errors!). Another feedback about your code is that There are not any C1204 compile error in MSVC71 if you build in the release mode. It seems that in debug mode, the compiler add addition info to the result binary and madee the scope of compiling became to too large to the compiler. Here are some questions about the serialization: 1, Is the archive written by you ? 2, Is the archive an independent lib? 3, how can I solve the link problem? 4, It seems that there is not a single header file that can be included by user who want to use the serialization(and the user can forget all other header files ). Do you have any plan to add this feature ? Here are my suggestions: 1, Take the archive to be an independent lib. 2, Move the whole serialization code to the head file,so there is no need to compile the lib with the bjam,and this can bring more protablity.( Since the io stream interface of stl is standard, I think it is no need to compile code into platform specific libs ) note: I am a Chinese , and my english is poor . If some word above offends you or seems to be impolite , forgive me please ^_^ goodmen goodmen@x263.net 2004-12-09