That's known as the hat pointer and it indicates that this resource is garbage collected. What you are looking at there is a Visual C++ CLI symbol. Microsoft calls this the
Handle to Object Operator (^)[
^]. You can think of this as a form of smart pointer (albeit one that relies on a garbage collection mentality), where the object is removed when the runtime decides that the object is no longer active.
[Edit]I missed your question about the
%
operator. This is the managed equivalent of a reference using C++/CLI. In general, if you think of
^
being equivalent to
*
in this world, then
%
is the equivalent of
&
.