>>Hi Rick,
>>Since Dmitry never marks his questions as solved, conversations go on :)
>>
>>If the code is in a base class, then there would be a need for type checking. I have real world use case for this, the same control could be used with a date, datetime or string depending on the chosen style and the conversion is done behind the scenes as needed. It wouldn't be feasible to create a different class per type to bind.
>>
>>Also, binding is not a must, without being bound, a textbox could simply be assigned a date value which would make its type date.
>
>And then there are such textboxes where the date value is actually starting as a blank string, so the user can enter a shortcut - "-3w" for "three weeks ago" or "+8" for "eight days in the future" etc. That may be easier for the user in some situations - scheduling, ticketing, field reporting etc, where they deal with near future or recent past a lot.

I rarely use textboxes separately. Instead I have a class with a number of similar looking containers, each has a label plus a textbox, calendar, spinner or any other "input" control. Several of these containers have a textbox which is "tied" to a special data type or variant thereof. This makes it very fast and easy to create "standard" forms with a similar look and feel.