Each month, I lead a Live Meeting for Microsoft Solutions Advocates highlighting new and exciting technology. This month, Bryan Agnetta talked about metro, the design philosophy behind Windows Phone 7.

If you haven’t heard of metro before, this would be a good recording to watch (Bryan starts about 30 minutes in). What makes Windows Phone 7 special is not just the technology – it’s the way everything was designed to fit your life. This didn’t happen by accident. It took a lot of wonderful, subtle design work.

Learning about metro (focus on the UI Design and Interaction Guide link on that page), I was struck by how useful the concepts are even outside of WP7. For example, the idea of being “authentically digital” … why do we try so hard to make software look like something in the physical world? Why not just make the “chrome” around the edges disappear and let the content speak for itself? The IE9 team clearly took that lesson to heart as well.

The new Windows phones will be out before you know it – it’s time to learn how to design for them … and the effort to learn metro will pay off in all your development projects.