This is very similar to the problems you can get using Boost Smart Pointers, for instance if a class internaly needs to return a representation of itself, all it knows is 'this' however you want it returned as a shared_ptr, but you cant just 'divine' the appropriate shared_ptr object.

the problem is, while you can go from managed to unmanaged, you cant go from unmanaged to managed, unless you build infrastructure to facilitate the join.

i've found it best to design around it if you can, otherwise, baring some special tricks youll need an association table i think.

The Marshal class a lot of magic in it. Might be what you're looking for. Usually you just have to deal with IntPtr's but I'm not entirely sure how that's translated into C++/CLI.