ok so I am a bit confused and looking for some clarification. Basically what i am trying to do is build a silverlight application that will use a wcf service to get data from. So for example in my application I can have a dropdown list of states that gets populated from a database. So my understanding is that first I create the silverlight application. Then I create the wcf service with a method in there that will give me a list(or whatever data I need). Once I have done that I add a service reference in my silverlight app and bind that to the dropdown list(or wherever I need it).

Now I created a simple wcf service that just returned "the number you entered was (number here)" whatever number they had entered into a text box before they hit submit. Which worked fine. However, the part that I am confused about is the whole database portion. From the way I understand it I make the connection to the database in the wcf service and get the data there and just return whatever is needed. Please let me know if I am wrong. But, I cannot seem to figure out how to make the database accessible from the wcf service. I created a simple database in the wcf service solution but was unsure how to actually make the connection. Any help is appreciated.