I did some experimenting with the manual command line and I have it running! The answer was to specify the command line as go run simple.go -debug=true -server=192.168.99.100 -user=sa -password=<MyPassword> -port=1433 (Note the = signs).
With this in mind, I then tweaked the args sections of the launch.json file to:
"args": [
"-debug=true",
"-server=192.168.99.100",
"-user=sa",
"-password=<MyPassword>",
"-port=1433"
],
And, whaddya know, it runs perfectly!
It’s strange that I must have read at least 10 articles which all gave me information, supposedly verified by others, but which, seemingly turned out to be incorrect. I suppose these periods of utter bewilderment followed by the euphoric relief of the resolution of a problem is what drives us to do this crazy coding thing…