In my MVC 4 project developed in VS2010, I have a screen that has a dropdown that shows date as dd-MMM-yyyy for the display text, with the underlying value as dd-mm-yyyy. 

In the function that posts the data, I can see that the selected value is in dd-mm-yyy when I alert it out.

```
  alert($("#dropdwn_BirthDateVal").val());

```

This line above shows my date as desired in dd-mm-yyyy format. 

However in the same method when I try to post that value to my controller 

```
  $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url:"@Url.Content("~/Home/GetUserDetails")",
            async:false,
            dataType: "JSON",
            data: {
                 //.....other string and integer values
                 //.....that go thru properly
                "myDto.DOB":  $("#dropdwn_BirthDateVal").val()
            },
            error: function (error) {
                alert(error);

           },

           ..... remaining code here 

```

...the date comes in as `1/1/0001 12:00:00 AM`

The controller action I am posting to, 'GetUserDetails' has a ViewModel class called UserVM as its paramter. UserVM has a dto class called MyDto. Within MyDto is a Date property called DOB of type DateTime. MyDto has other properties as well. The string and integer values go thru properly.

What am I missing?