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copied!<p>C++/CLI has a few interesting things that C# does not have:</p> <ul> <li><p>Strongly-typed boxing. If you box an <code>int</code> to an <code>object</code> in C#, you lose any information about what the original type was. Not the case in C++/CLI.</p></li> <li><p>A distinction between destructors and finalizers. In C# you have to manually implement <code>IDisposable</code> and remember to call <code>Dispose</code>. In C++/CLI, you just chuck the cleanup code in the destructor (which automatically gets compiled into a <code>Dispose</code> method), and put the managed-only cleanup code in the finalizer.</p></li> <li><p>A distinction between stack and heap semantics for variables. Stack is the default, and stack-allocated reference types will <strong>automatically</strong> be destroyed (disposed) - you don't have to remember to <code>delete</code> them, just let them go out of scope. To make a long story short, it's a lot easier to deal with unmanaged resources in C++/CLI than any other .NET language.</p></li> <li><p>Function pointers. This is less of a distinction now with anonymous delegates and lambda syntax in C#, but back in 2005 this was kind of a big deal.</p></li> <li><p>Access to <strong>all</strong> of the access modifiers implemented in the CLR. You can explicitly specify public, protected or private for both the same assembly <em>and</em> external assemblies. All you have in C# (other than the obvious <code>public</code>, <code>protected</code>, <code>private</code>) are the <code>internal</code> and <code>protected internal</code> modifiers, the former meaning "public internally, private externally" and the latter meaning "public internally, protected externally". In C++ you can make a class "protected AND internal", which means that the member is only accessible to derived classes in the <em>same</em> assembly.</p></li> <li><p>Value classes. Weird, but probably useful to someone!</p></li> </ul> <p>There's a more detailed explanation of all this and more <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms379617(VS.80).aspx" rel="noreferrer">here</a>. To make a long story short, other managed languages - C#, VB.NET, F#, and so on - do not actually give you full access to everything that the CLR can do, more like 90% of it. C++/CLI lets you do pretty much anything you want that's in the CLR spec.</p>

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