I am an experienced C++ developer, I know the language in great details and have used some of its specific features intensively. Also, I know principles of OOD and design patterns. I am now learning C# but I cannot stop the feeling not being able to get rid of C++ mindset. I tied myself so hard to the strengths of C++ that I cannot live without some of the features. And I cannot find any good workarounds or replacements for them in C#.

What good practices, design patterns, idioms that are different in C# from C++ perspective can you suggest? How to get a perfect C++ design not looking dumb in C#?

Specifically, I cannot find a good C#-ish way to deal with (recent examples):

• Controlling the lifetime of resources that require deterministic cleanup (like files). This is easy having using in hand but how to use it properly when ownership of the resource is being transfered [... betwen threads]? In C++ I would simply use shared pointers and let it take care of 'garbage collection' just at the right time.
• Constant struggling with overriding functions for specific generics (I love things like partial template specialization in C++). Should I just abandon any attempts to do any generic programming in C#? Maybe generics are limited on purpose and it is not C#-ish to use them except for a specific domain of problems?
• Macro-like functionality. While generally a bad idea, for some domain of problems there is no other workaround (e.g. conditional evaluation of a statement, like with logs that should only go to Debug releases). Not having them means that I need to put more if (condition) {...} boilerplate and it is still not equal in terms of triggering side effects.