What's happening is that, by default, the character is being written out in UTF-8. If you want to just write out the character as if it were a ushort, either cast it to a ushort, or change the encoding for the binary writer. By the way, writing out the ushort 0xABCD to a file will produce 0xCD 0xAB in that order. Cheers, Julian Program Manager, C# This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.