ASP.NET Ajax CalendarExtender will not update SelectedDate value

After searching the Internet countless times, there doesn't appear to be a fix for this problem. A solution (if you want to call it that) could be to manually assign SelectedDate using conversion from the textbox (this requires you to set the format in the markup, though):

if(IsPostBack) {
blahCalendarExtender.SelectedDate = DateTime.ParseExact(blah.Text, blahCalendarExtender.Format, null);
// do postback actions
} else {
// for instance, maybe initalize blahCalendarExtender to today
blahCalendarExtender.SelectedDate = DateTime.Today;
}

(Where blah is the Text Control and blahCalendarExtender is the extender extending blah)

It seems that the calendarExtender control should be intelligent enough to do this on its own though.