ASP.NET 2.0 GridView FormatStrings

You can supply format strings to the columns in your GridView by setting the DataFormatString property of the column to something like this: "{0:d}". However, you may have run across a case where you set this property and the system does not recognize the format string you provided. To make this work, you need to set the HtmlEncode property of that column to "False". Then the DataFormatString will act as expected when displayed at run-time.