As I move forward with my Entity Framework book, I have of late been spending a lot of time in the Entity Framework forums on MSDN. While I have been asking a few questions, mostly I've been challenging myself by testing my knowledge and pushing myself to learn more by reading and answering lots of questions.

It feels the same to me as sitting down with a Sudoku puzzle. I can't help but want to work on it until I either solve it, or discover I screwed up so completely that it's unfix-able.

Many people answer questions on the forums to acquire MVP status. But I just had mine renewed at the beginning of the month. I'm really doing this more for fun and brain exercise than any other reason.

And it has been really helpful for me because every time you think you know something, somebody else looks at it from a different perspective and it forces you to do the same.

For example someone was having a problem with a Entity SQL query where one of the property names was "value" and the error was complaining about the name "value". I wondered if his problem had to do with the fact that Entity SQL has a keyword called VALUE. Could there be a conflict? So out of curiosity, I set up an example that had a property named value and wrote a whole bunch of ESQL queries against it and they all worked just fine. It turned out that his problem was completely unrelated to the value column.

But I had never even considered the idea of there being a conflict with keyword or operators names. Now I know there isn't.

So now when I have a bit of time that I need to procrastinate, rather then looking to see what ridiculous comments are being left on the website of our local newspaper (there is a group of people who seem to comment and debate and insult each other on every article), instead I head over to the MSDN forums to see what I can learn.