Question: I'm working on a journaling system in C# at our local church, but I've run into trouble with the database connection when storing birth dates. According to [MSDN](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.minvalue.aspx?appId=Dev10IDEF1&l=EN-US&k=k%28SYSTEM.DATETIME%29;k%28TargetFrameworkMoniker-%22.NETFRAMEWORK&k=VERSION=V4.0%22%29;k%28DevLang-CSHARP%29&rd=true) the earlist date possible to represent is January 1st year 1. How am I supposed to record the birth date of Jesus Christ and earlier personalities that are important us?

Answer: 
If you are free to decide on type of calendar then I would recommend you to go-ahead with the Gregorian calendar, which has the 

> 
> ability to recognize two eras: B.C.
>  and A.D.
> 
> 
> 

<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.gregoriancalendar.aspx>
Simple answer - store the day, month and year as separate numeric fields. The day and month can be combined into a day-of-the-year value, but you need to watch out for leap years.

Alternative answer - there are standard ways to convert a date into a day-number and back...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day>

If you do the conversion yourself, you're basically storing a number (that just happens to represent a date) so you should have no problems. Well - other than making sure your conversions are correct.