I'm completely stumped on this one. As far as I can see the documentation and other posts on SO I've read say this should work. I must be missing something silly, but I just cannot see it.

I get a FormatException with the message "String was not recognized as a valid DateTime." on the following line of code:

```
return DateTime.ParseExact(value, DateFormat, null,
                           DateTimeStyles.AllowWhiteSpaces | DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal);

```

* `value` is `"11/04/2013"`
* `DateFormat` is `"dd/MM/yyyy"`
* The current culture is `en-GB`
* I've tried various variants of `DateTimeStyles` but to no effect.

My original intent was for the format `ddd, dd/MMM/yyyy` but that didn't work either (the value in that instance was `Tue, 30/Apr/2013`)

I've also tried forcing the culture to en-GB by passing in `new CultureInfo("en-GB")` instead of the `null`

I also extracted the code into its own console application to see if there was different about the environment (ASP.NET MVC 3)

```
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Globalization;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

namespace ConsoleApplication2
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            var DateFormat = "dd/MM/yyyy";
            var value = "30/04/2013";
            var culture = new CultureInfo("en-GB");
            var result = DateTime.ParseExact(value, DateFormat, culture,
                           DateTimeStyles.AllowWhiteSpaces | DateTimeStyles.AssumeUniversal);
            Console.WriteLine("\"{0}\" as \"{1}\" ==> {2}", value, DateFormat, result);
            Console.ReadKey();
        }
    }
}

```

And that still gives me the same error.