The arrow is the member-dereference operator. Whenever you are using a pointer, you use an arrow rather than a dot to access its members.

I have an application with an MFC menubar. On those menus there are several options, but only three of them are check/uncheck style. All three of these become disabled whenever a particular dialog box is called upon. This only occurs when that particular dialog box is brought up. In the OnUpdateMenuItem(CCmdUI* pCmdUI) for each of the three items I am explicitly calling pCmdUI->Enable(). Any ideas as to what is causing this? There are no explicit Disable commands in the dialog's source code.