title: WinForm DateTimePicker blues. Is it me?
body: <p>I want to be able to accept a NULL date using the DateTimePicker control.</p>
  
  <p>The "Checked" property appears to be intended to specify whether the control "holds a date" or now. However, when "unchecked", the date still appears, though it appears disabled. To me, this is distracting. If the intent of the unchecked checkbox is to indicate that there is no date value, why is there ANY date value disable or otherwise that appears in the textbox? It seems to me that if the control is unchecked, the textbox should be EMPTY and that seeing a dimmed date value when the user really wants "no value" is distracting. </p>
  
  <p>If the user toggled the checkbox on, then I would like the ability to place a default value into the textbox.</p>
  
  <p>I am considering creating a usercontrol that toggles between a dateTimePicker control and a textBox, but I hate to go through this trouble.</p>
  
  <p>I tried looking a Telerik's DateTimePicker but trying to get decent null handling functionality out of that control seems worse.  I'd love to see a working example of what one of you think is a user-friendly code example with either the std MS or Telerik DateTimePicker control that accepts null input. </p>
  
  <p>I've looked at a few opensource controls, but every time they fix one issue, they introduce others.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:</p>
  
  <p>See my answer below. It seems to work fine, now I just want to make it part of every DateTimePicker's behavior.</p>