title: CLR, Win32, WinRT in Windows architecture
body: <p>I have browsed around and found similar questions to which all responses have been unclear and blurry at best and it annoys me to not have a clear picture of the Windows architecture. There are layers in Windows which in my head has always looked something like this (from top to bottom):</p>
  
  <p>[.NET]</p>
  
  <p>[Win32]</p>
  
  <p>[Microkernel]</p>
  
  <p>[HAL]</p>
  
  <p>[Hardware]</p>
  
  <p>Recently I have seen images like this:
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/49YzE.jpg" alt="enter image description here">
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/3jLdy.png" alt="enter image description here"></p>
  
  <p>I am confused, especially about the fact that it seems that CLR is running in parallell with WinAPI. I guess my question is this:</p>
  
  <p><strong>UPDATE</strong>
  Q: Where can I find clear and explanatory <strong>resources</strong> that describe the OS architecture in recent versions of Windows (7,8, Server 2012 etc)?</p>