With the retirement of ADS, I decided to take a look at the MSSQL extension for VSCode. This is an alternative to using SSMS for development work. This extension was updated in the fall of 2024, but I hadn’t had a reason to use it. I mostly use SSMS, and on occasions ADS, but this was my opportunity to check out the alternative editor. This post looks at installation, connecting to databases, grouping those connections, and running queries.
Note: this tutorial assumes you have SQL Server installed somewhere. This is only a client to connect to an existing instance.
Installation