Getting this silly thing to work turned out to be a painful experience, so I am recording my lessons learned so that if some other downtrodden programmer wants to see what I did, they will be able to figure it out faster (hopefully): Ok, so say you have a silverlight application and you want to talk to a database. Silverlight is Client-based, and Databases are Server based. This is a problem. You can either pass the values in initially (not very good for interactive stuff) or you can make a WCF service....