How should I prepare myself for a move from managed-memory?
You just need to remember that in C and C++ you need to cleanup your own mess. So malloc and new need to have matching free and delete respectively. Managed code handles all of this using some kind of garbage collection. Maybe you can start off using STL containers such as vector, list, etc. as they will manage memory themselves. You just need to remember to deallocate all memory that you allocate on the heap using malloc and new operators.