Michael,
As the others have suggested.
ASCII is 7 bit values (0 to 127), do you perhaps want ANSI (8 bit values (0
to 255))?
You can use Asc to get the ANSI value of a character, of the current Windows
code page.
You can use AscW to get the Unicode value of a character. Remember that
characters & strings in .NET are kept in Unicode.
You can use System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes to get the entire string as
an array of ASCII bytes.
You can use System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes to get the entire string
as an array of ANSI bytes of the current Windows code page.
Note Encoding.ASCII & Encoding.Default are shared properties that return a
System.Text.Encoding object, there are other shared properties for other
encodings.
For information on ASCII, ANSI, Unicode and how Encoding works see:
http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/unicode.html
Hope this helps
Jay