Parsing the textbox text to date time

Parsing the textbox text to date time

I am using asp.net 4.0 and using ajax toolkit calander extender to get
values in date filed from the user.
I am trying to parse the value in the datetime filld as follows
DateTime.ParseExact("10/10/2013", "MM/dd/yyyy", null)
Which is not working. I was going throught my code and came to a strange
result
When I put - inplace of \ it started woking.
Can anybody explain why it is like that.