It does not make sense for this to work in debug mode; that must be a mis-observation.
WCHAR is a Microsoft alias for wchar_t (or unsigned short if needs be) (ref).
You have an array of these things.
Said array will never be compatible with const char*, because wchar_t and char are two different things. So, you cannot pass your array to functions that require const char*, like strcmp.
C (and, by extension, C++) also provides a wide-character version of strcmp that you can use: wcscmp.
