Dealing With Dates And Null Values

Hi Everyone

Very new to .net and currently dipping my toes in the water with a small application, but getting to the point -

I have a form which has somel text fields that expect a date but which are not a required field so in other words the user can leave them blank.


The code behind page stores the information using a stored procedure which I add parameters to in the following fashion -
SqlParameter userdate = new SqlParameter();
userdate .ParameterName = "@dtdate";
userdate .SqlDbType = SqlDbType.DateTime;
userdate .Direction = ParameterDirection.Input;
userdate .Value = dtdate.Text.ToString();
cmd.Parameters.Add(userdate);

Now if I leave the text field dtdate blank I receive an error because the above expects a date.

If I remove the line userdate .SqlDbType = SqlDbType.DateTime; I don't recieve an error but my stored procedure saves the date as 01/01/1900 or similar.

I believe this is because in my stored procedure the paramger dtdate is defined as @dtdate datetime

Obviously I want to have it so that if the user leaves the text field empty then no date is saved in the database and was wondering how other people tackle this scenario.