Formatting a string into a phone number format

[JuggaloBrotha]

I suspect you're on your own on that one. It is a popular but entirely untrue myth that the masked textbox requires little or no validation! Foolproof, it ain't!

I never said anything about validation as validation will need to be done no matter what UI control you use, but what it does offer is a way to help the user enter the data into the desired format (using visual queues too) which would be much more ideal than a standard textbox in this case, that's the point I was getting across.

Yes, I'm retrieving from a database. It is being written by another program, which can't be changed...

Then you'll want to consider making an extension method as MattP has suggested to keep the formatting in one place & have the flexibility for calling it from the string object directly.