How to initialize a DateTime field?

Question

I am absolutly new in C# (I came from Java) and I have a very stupid problem

I have to initialize some DateTime fields into an object but I have som

Answer 1

You are using a character literal '' which can only contain one character. If you want to use a string literal use "" instead.

C# does not support DateTime-literals as opposed to VB.NET (#4/30/1998#).

Apart from that, a string is not a DateTime. If you have a string you need to parse it to DateTime first:

string published = "1998,04,30";
DateTime dtPublished = DateTime.ParseExact(published, "yyyy,MM,dd", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
mySmallVuln.Published = dtPublished; 

or you can create a DateTime via constructor:

DateTime dtPublished = new DateTime(1998, 04, 30);

or, since your string contains the year, month and day as strings, using String.Split and int.Parse:

string[] tokens = published.Split(',');
if (tokens.Length == 3 && tokens.All(t => t.All(Char.IsDigit)))
{
    int year = int.Parse(tokens[0]);
    int month = int.Parse(tokens[1]);
    int day = int.Parse(tokens[2]);
    dtPublished = new DateTime(year, month, day);
}