Presumably still months before rollout – there’s no date yet – Microsoft started talking up the next version of its developer tools and platform, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Monday describing them as enabling cloud computing and democratizing application lifecycle management (ALM).

The “democratizing” Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) 2010, code-named Rosario, is supposed to bring all the members of a development organization – from the core developers and testers to the wider team of project managers, designers and business analysts – into the application development lifecycle and remove many of the existing barriers to integration.

It said both technical and non-technical users would be able to create and use models to collaborate and define business and system functionality graphically. The new VSTF version supports both the Object Management Group’s Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Domain Specific Language (DSL).

It said the new modeling capabilities are a core part of the larger Microsoft modeling platform, which will also include the so-called Oslo repository, tools and language.

Microsoft claims to be “dramatically” simplifying the tools for integrating testing across the lifecycle. New features include the ability to eliminate non-reproducible bugs, fast setup and deployment of tests to ensure, it says, a high degree of test completeness, focused test planning and progress tracking, ensuring that all code changes are properly tested.

The capabilities and scalability of the Team Foundation Server (TFS) are being upgraded so teams can configure and adopt any flavor of Agile development processes. Teams can track and trace work more easily because of hierarchical work item relationships. There are visualization tools for tracking changes across branches and into production builds.

VSTS 2010 also introduces workflow-based builds that are supposed to catch errors before they have a chance to affect the rest of the team or enter production.

To increase integration across the lifecycle, VSTS 2010 will provide a unified VSTS Development and Database product.