Question

I doubt I am the only one who has come up with this solution, but if you have a better one please post it here. I simply want to leave this question here so I and others can search it later.

I needed to tell whether a valid date had been entered into a text box and this is the code that I came up with. I fire this when focus leaves the text box.

try {     DateTime.Parse(startDateTextBox.Text); } catch {     startDateTextBox.Text = DateTime.Today.ToShortDateString(); } 

Answer 1

DateTime.TryParse 

This I believe is faster and it means you dont have to use ugly try/catches 🙂

e.g

DateTime temp; if(DateTime.TryParse(startDateTextBox.Text, out temp)) {   // Yay :) } else {   // Aww.. :( }