I often times come across a situation where I have a string in a certain date time format and wish to convert that string into a .NET DateTime object for further manipulation.  In one recent situation, a date was supplied in an XML node (without a specified data type) as a string, but the output of the date had to be in a specific format for my client. 

Example:  We need to convert <submit_date>2010-12-04 13:22:32</submit_date> and output it as December 4, 2010 at 1:22 PM