>Thanks. with some tweeking, that work. Can you tell me how I can adjust the size of the columns programatically so that the entire date field appears?

You can change it writting in Width property. You can calculate the width using size of your font.

YourColumn.Width = Fontmetric(6,<YourFontName>,<YourFontSize>) * 10
*                                                                ^^^
*   assuming that your date column will be 10 characters long: mm/dd/yyyy