>I'm looking for get as close as having a table to be
> permanently opened at the startup of an application
> in VFP, with VFP native table, and I was wondering
> how close I could get to that with SQL Server.
Leaving the connection "open" is the closest that you can get to leaving
a VFP table open. Although, this is almost like comparing apples to oranges.

In SQL Server, one of the more expensive operations (in terms of time spent) is opening the connection to the server. In desktop applications is a common practice to open the connection once (as soon as the app is launch) and leave it open during the session to improve performance. There is an option to share this connection accross all views and queries to the backend. This way you will only use one connection per user (which might be acceptable on certain scenarios but not in others.)