14 DAY TRIAL // While Windows 7 is still a taboo subject as far as Microsoft is concerned, with the company offering just crumbs from the feast that is Windows Vista's successor, details do manage to slip through, and the Redmond company has nobody to blame for it but itself. In this context, the software giant has revealed via MSDN that Windows 7 will bring the evolution of the .theme file format introduced with Windows 95, and nothing short of a true survivor. The further growth of the .theme file format will be interpretable only by Windows 7, with the previous versions of Windows ignoring new aspects.
The updated Creating and Installing Theme Files documentation containing the references to Windows 7, and uncovered by Long Zheng, has been altered to remove all references to the next iteration of the Windows client. However, thanks to the Google and Live Search cache, users can still access the original resource and get an idea of what Windows 7 will bring to the table. A relevant aspect also worth noting is the fact that Microsoft constantly refers not only to Windows 7, but also to Windows 8.
As far as the Themes are concerned, the software giant indicated that for "Windows 7 and later - the icon to show in the theme gallery, either an embedded resource or a path to an .ico file. Paths are relative to the directory of the .theme file."
This, while for Desktop Appearance "you can create custom wallpaper for the desktop and specify a path to the graphics file. Additionally, this section of the .theme file can specify whether the screen saver is active. The following example shows how to do modify the desktop appearance. Windows 7 and later: If the slideshow is active, the path can be a path to a folder containing multiple images, or a colon-delimited list of image files."
In this regard, users will be able to set a slideshow as the wallpaper, this probably in addition to the DreamScene video backgrounds which are likely to be kept alive from Windows Vista Ultimate. Additionally, Microsoft has more items tucked up its sleeve, such as Theme Packs.
"Windows 7 and later - a theme pack is a .cab file that contains not only the .theme file but also the files needed to implement the theme on another computer, such as sound files and images. Users can create theme packs through the Personalization application in Control Panel," the company noted.