Parsing datetime in textbox

I have datetime in one simple textbox. The format of the textbox's value can be anything like DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY. I want to parse this using DateTime.Parse(string). Currently for some dates it works and for others it throws Exception. How do I handle this? How do I make sure that no matter what format is provided it always parses correct (as long as it is valid date)?

Thanks in advance :)

EDIT

As there is no fix answer to it I modify my question to ask how do I convert it to MM/DD/YYYY? What should I provide in IFormat开发者_开发百科Provider of DateTime.Parse?

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DateTime needs to know how to parse the date otherwise it won't know whether 05/07/2011 is the 5th July or the 7th May. Wouldn't it be better to use a calendar control to remove this ambiguity?

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I suggest using a fixed format. You may even allow your users to select the format they want to use. But you absolutely need to know the format. Then you could use DateTime.TryParseExact. For instance, what would 01/03/2011 mean? It could be mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy. You really need to be explicit about this.

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I came here to figure out if I can find a better solution than mine. I already saw some of this solution propose here in other post and google. What IMHO works better is follow:

    DateTime date;
    bool isDate = (DateTime.TryParseExact(txtbxDATETIME.Value, 
                                               "yyyy'/'MM'/'dd",
                                                CultureInfo.InvariantCulture,
                                                DateTimeStyles.None,
                                                out date));
   //possible use:
   DateTime someDATEorVAr =  (isDate) ? date : DateTime.Now;

Hope somebody find this useful

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That parsing problem can be solved by using the TryParse(String, IFormatProvider, DateTimeStyles, DateTime) variant so that culture info (most commonly I use CultureInfo.CurrentCulture) can be passed to it and thus removing the ambiguity.

DateTime.TryParse

Vijay