Sometime between beta 2 and beta 3, a bug crept into ASP.NET 2.0’s BoundField class that prevents date formatting from working. In the following declaration, the “{0:d”} is ignored:
The bug was slated to be fixed in the RTM release, but alas, it wasn’t. There is, however, a work-around: set the BoundField’s HtmlEncode property to false:
<asp:BoundField HtmlEncode=”false” … />
Microsoft is aware of the bug and has promised that it will be fixed in a future release.