>In your opinion, would it be best for me to code the formatting I need for these dates by using the references you sent me? Or, should I separate the date fields rather than stringing the date together using one textbox?

I like the idea of having just one control databound to a single datasource. Then you have the two separate aspects to deal with: input (parsing) and display (format).

As you mentioned, you could create a user control that contains three separate controls for separately entering day, month, and year. But I don't like user controls because they are awkward to inherit from (they work with the concept of containership, not inheritance).

For example, you create a user control that contains three textboxes. Then you come up with the smart idea to subclass the textbox to create a mytextbox subclass. If you want your user control to contain three mytextboxes, you can't. You have to throw it away and create a new user control that contains three mytextboxes.

If you have every tried to put anything other than a boolean or textbox in a Datagrid column then you will know the frustration.

So the bottom line is you can do something easy with a user control and don't plan on subclassing it. Or bite the bullet and create a single textbox that handles the databind parse and format events that can be easily inherited from.