not exactly sure what you mean with "visible to my users" but you can create a connection in your program like:

lcMyDSN = "DRIVER=SQL Server;SERVER=myServer;UID=whaterver;PWD=whatever;DATABASE=mydata;"
lnHandle = SQLSTRINGCONNECT(lcMyDSN)

is this what you need?

>Hi all,
>
>Looking for some advice. I'm currently playing around with using Sql Server 2000 as the backend with VFP. I've gotten it to work quite well using a System DSN, but the thought of making that available and visible to my users is quite a scary thought ! I'd like to create a File DSN and bury it on a server somewhere that I can just reference in my VFP programs to authenticate the user to SQL Server. Does anyone have any advice on accomplishing this ? I've created the file DSN, but I'm having a problem with the VFP syntax to call it. Thanks in advance.