Probably simple problem w/ RECT members

I'm trying to do what I thought would be as straightforward a task as there can be.

All I want to do is set up a bunch of RECT objects to use in a DrawText call.

But for some reason my program crashes, and this crash seems to have to do with assigning values to the RECT structures.

I'm not a C person so I don't use structures too often. And I've only been programming C++ for a few months. So here's the code:

Code:

---

RECT *rctHeading;
RECT *rctBody;
RECT *rctFooter;

  rctHeading->left=0;
  rctHeading->top=0;
  rctHeading->right=639;
  rctHeading->bottom=60;
  rctBody->left=40;
  rctBody->top=80;
  rctBody->right=599;
  rctBody->bottom=449;
  rctFooter->left=0;
  rctFooter->top=460;
  rctFooter->right=639;
  rctFooter->bottom=479;

---

When I comment out the assignments the program works fine. What am I doing wrong?

RECT *rctHeading; is a pointer....and if you dont assign a pointer to something, and then try dereference it, you'll be lucky not to crash

You could do;

RECT *rctHeading = new RECT;

that would allocate memory for the pointer to point to

Gotcha.