This article provides a quick comparison between C++/CLI and C#. It’s meant for those who know C# (and possibly C++) and will explain which C++/CLI language construct correspond with which in C#. (I don’t know Visual Basic so I can’t add infos about this here.)
Note: This is not a complete reference but rather quick reference for those features that are (in my opinion) the most unclear.
C++/CLI allows you to mix native C++ code with managed .NET code (which is extremly nice). Mixing such code also allows you to create methods in a .NET class that take or return pointers to native (C++) classes. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work out of the box across assemblies (read: DLLs). If you define a .NET class in one assembly and this class has a method that returns a pointer, you may not be able to use this method from within another C++/CLI assembly.
This article describes the problem and shows solutions.
The .NET framework features an interface called IDisposable. It basically exists to allow freeing unmanaged resources (think: C++ pointers). In most cases, you won’t need IDisposable when writing C# code. There are some exceptions though, and it becomes more important when writing C++/CLI code.
The help page for IDisposable provides the code for IDisposable‘s default implementation pattern in C#. This article will explain each part of it step by step and also provide the equivalent C++/CLI code in each step.