I am using Borland's C++ BuilderX Personal. Great tool, and also multiplatform. You can use the same IDE in WIndows, Linux, Solaris... Also good if you need cross-compiling. You can register your own...

Besides, you do not have a break statement for case 3. You need to put break statements for each case.

The error means that you are trying to access an uninitialized object (not necessarrilly NULL, but uninitialized). Having bad experiences with VS.NET debugger, my hint would be to inspect the objects...

You sure did not get this message when running your program - it is a linker error complaining that it did not find a certain function (that would be GetInformation). You are not quite specific, but...

I think you should use both solutions : make a forward declaration and use pointer dereferencing. If you don't use pointers, compiler allocates the objects on the stack, which is much slower than...