Following the previous two meetings held in Garmisch (V) and Giens (VI), the present conference deals with materials microstructure and properties, as they can be studied by diffraction methods, with a special interest in the application of diffraction techniques to polycrystalline materials, methodologies for the study of lattice defects, residual stress and texture in thin films, surfaces and nanostructures, line-broadening analysis, line-profile fitting and modelling based on fundamental parameters for applications in materials science problems. New topics, added at SS-VI, were microbeam diffraction and coherent diffraction. SS-VII will add X-ray and neutron imaging, and PDF (pair distribution function) analysis to the list of methodologies covered.