I'm writing an unmanaged c++ console app. I'm using ado to connect to
a sql server 2000 database and query it. When I hard code the db
connection string connecting to the db works fine. The problem is that
when I read the string in from the console into a variable and try to
use the variable -- I can't get that to work.

this works:

_bstr_t strCnn("my database connection string");

none of this works:

        string targetConnectString;
	cout << "enter target connection string: ";
	getline(cin, targetConnectString);
	const char * t = targetConnectString.c_str();
	const _bstr_t bstr = targetConnectString.c_str();

it will compile but it won't connect succesfuly.

so the question is how do i connect with a dynamic string?

i think it's a conversion problem i'm failing to solve.