WinRT and Windows internals history

Turning to the past to power Windows' future: An in-depth look at WinRT

Great ArsTechnica article by Peter Bright.

Windows COM and ATL

Alright! Lots of new links to my favourite windows subject! COM!

The Dr. GUI is the best tutorials ever written on the subject available online. There are a couple of books that may cover the subject better (like Inside COM, Essential COM and ATL Internals) but thats up for discussion.

1. Dr. GUI. on Components, COM and ATL, written by Dr. GUI and hosted at MSDN
2. Dr. GUI and ATL
3. Dr. GUI and COM Automation, Part 1
4. Dr. GUI and COM Automation, Part 2: COM´s fabulous Data Types
5. Dr. GUI and COM Automation, Part 3: More on COM´s fabulous Data Types
6. Dr. GUI and COM Events, Part 1
7. Dr. GUI and COM Events, Part 2

And then som excellent architectural articles.

1. From CPP to COM, written by Markus Horstmann, OLE Program Manager at Microsoft
2. DCOM Architecture, by Markus Horstmann and Mary Kirtland, covers topics like mashalling and apartment models
3. The Component Object Model: A Technical Overview, by Sara Williams and Charlie Kindel, Developer Relations Group Microsoft
4. Understanding and using COM Threading Models, by Jason SMith, Software Design Engineer at Microsoft

A resonable good introduction to COM and ATL at MSDN

1. Introduction to COM and ATL

A simple tutorial

1. COM Clients: Concepts and Programming, By Robert Oberg hosted at Windows IT Library

And at last a bit off topic a link to MSDN´s ActiveX Controls documentation. The most interesting stuff here is maybe the statment that once and for all (?) tells us what an ActiveX control is!

"A Microsoft ActiveX control is essentially a simple OLE object that supports the IUnknown interface"

1. ActiveX Controls

Update
I found an article series on DevCentral named An introduction to DCOM when looking into what Marshall Brain had written. It is adapted from the book Understanding DCOM by Marshall Brain and William Rubin.

Update 2
Further reading on The Code Project uncovered the article series COM in plain C which is a great article written by Jeff Glatt