One huge advantage of the DateTimePicker control is that it is regional aware. This means that it uses settings from windows to control how it displays. Specifically, if you are set to US English, it will display (to the user) dates in day/month/year format. Please understand that this is a display only thing. Under the hood, the DateTimePicker control stores the value as a Date. When you step through the code and look at the .value property, the VB6 IDE is showing that value to you formatted using your regional settings (which I suspect is day/month/year).
The significance of this is... when you install your app on a computer that has regional settings different than yours, it will display the date to the user in their preferred format.
I am from the US. Most of my customers are also in the US. I do have a couple customers in Canada. I recall many years ago running in to a problem with my Canadian customers related to this exact situation. I switched to the DateTimePicker control so that the user would see a date formatted the way they are accustomed to seeing it (some people in Canada prefer month/day/year). I then handle the data in code as a Date value. My app uses a SQL Server database. When saving the data, I use parameter objects which can handle date variables so I never have problems with "date ambiguity" (is the m/d/y for d/m/y ???).
Basically, what I am trying to say is... the best way to handle dates in your application is to keep the data in Date variables as much as possible. It's only when you convert a date to a string and vice versa that you will run in to problems. By using the DateTimePicker control, you are letting the control do all the work for you.
If you can't use a parameter object like I do, then just format the .value property like strongm suggested in your other thread.
msgbox(DateTimePicker.Value, "yyyymmdd")
Does this make sense?
-George
Microsoft SQL Server MVP
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