ASP.NET MVC 2 DataAnnotation: Server side validation for Required always fails on DateTime object

Question

I am getting a strange issue with DataAnnotations in ASP.NET MVC 2which I am unable to get the hand of.

I am trying to validate a DateTime

In a Model Class I have defined

private DateTime _dateFrom;


[Required(ErrorMessage="Date is required")]
public DateTime DateFrom
{
  get { return _dateFrom; }
  set { _dateFrom = value; }
}

On the client side validation this works fine. However the server side validation always fails returning the "Date is required" error message.

If I change the Public property as below everything validates fine.

[Required(ErrorMessage="Date is required")]
public string DateFrom
{
  get { return _dateFrom.ToShortDateString(); }
  set { _dateFrom = DateTime.Parse(value); }
}

But this doesn't seem like the right way to go.

Am I missing something here? (this isn't a date parsing issue)

thanks for helping out, Dennis