Looking to the past to power Windows' future: An in-depth look at WinRT | Ars Technica

Turning to the past to power Windows’ future: An in-depth look at WinRT. Nice overview of the history of Windows APIs and then a detailed look at WinRT and why it's not as new and independent as Microsoft claims and how it's really integrated into the system environment (TL;DR WinRT is modernized COM based on Win32 with automatic wrappers for .NET and JavaScript).