Return to the native land
I have heard about and experienced myself the fun/pain of transitioning into managed code from native. However, right now I'm going through the reverse phase. I'm coding in pure C++ after almost 3 years. Its not maintainence work but designing and creating new COM components that are used from managed and native code, which makes it all the more difficult.
The feeling is kind of weird. I get the same macho-geeky feelings one gets when mucking around with COM pointers and weird ATL macros and fix memory corruption/leaks. But mostly I feel scared. I double check every allocation I make to ensure I have released them and feel helplessly out of Fx support.
The funny part is that all the weird COM things which I desperately wanted to forget came back seamlessly. I have an advice for people working on COM. Bring up a text editor and code COM scratch up without any Fx support once. Manage all the ugly vtables, aggregation, dispatch tables yourself and then you'll never ever forget it. I think inside COM or one such books Essential COM takes the reader through this step and thats the one I followed and its helping me immensely now.
