What’s New in VS Code 1.93? ESM Migration, SQL Fixes, and Enhanced IntelliSense

About ESM

Microsoft announced Visual Studio Code (VS Code) version 1.93, which completes most of the work to replace the older AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) standard with ESM (ECMAScript Modules). ESM is the native standard for modern browsers, while AMD predates it.

Engineer Benjamin Pasero explained that a build flag now creates an ESM variant of VS Code, running a migration script that converts the TypeScript source code to an ESM‑compatible format. The goal is to ship an ESM‑enabled Insiders build in September and a stable release in October.

The migration will be cautious: if the ESM build has issues, the code can be reverted to AMD. The team will start removing AMD traces from the source and drop the option to build VS Code as AMD.

Although the change should be invisible to developers, it is a significant step for a large codebase and may accelerate broader ESM adoption.

SQL Hint Fixes

Version 1.93 includes a fix for a problem where SQL Server language features were incorrectly described as generic SQL statements. VS Code’s syntax highlighting for .sql files sometimes mishandles certain statements, such as the “qualify” clause.

Microsoft senior software engineer Charles Gagnon clarified that VS Code now adopts MS SQL (T‑SQL) syntax as the default “sql” language. When opening a .sql file with default settings, the status bar now correctly shows “MS SQL” instead of just “SQL”. Users can click the identifier or install an extension to change the file association.

Configuration File Improvements

The configuration file editor UI, previously experimental, is now enabled by default. Configuration files let developers store settings, extensions, view layouts, keybindings, snippets, and tasks under a named profile and switch between them across workspaces.

Django Optimization

Python developers will appreciate that VS Code can now discover and run Django unit tests directly from the Test Explorer, a feature first requested back in 2017.

IntelliSense Enhancements

The browser‑hosted version of VS Code has improved IntelliSense packages, providing documentation and code completion for imported packages such as React. Full IntelliSense for JavaScript and TypeScript now supports “Go to Definition” and “Find All References”. This functionality works in Chrome, Edge, and Firefox but not in Safari due to the missing ReadableByteStreamController API.

New JavaScript Enhancements

For JavaScript developers, an experimental network view shows request and response details in browser sessions and is also available for Node.js 22.6+. When using Node, the flag --experimental-network-inspection must be added at startup; however, the network implementation is still early and many request/response details are unavailable.

Happy coding!