The absolute “bible” on operating system design is and was Andrew Tanenbaum’s Operating Systems Design and Implementation – the “Dragon” book 🙂
There are plenty of other references, too, e.g. Developing Your Own 32-Bit Operating System.
Microsoft Research also has/had a project on creating an operating system in managed code (C#) called Singularity – that might provide some insights/papers etc.
Writing a complete OS is neither a trivial nor a quick task, though…..