How do I get a valid regularexpression for a date

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MVC5

I have an MVC 5.2 app in VS 2015, working with SQL Server 2016.

I have a field called Assessment_Date, which is defined in the database as a varchar(10), not as a Date, as I only want to work with the date and not the time.

I want to require the users to enter a date in the form: mm/dd/yyyy

In my partial class, I have the following lines pertinent to this field:

[RegularExpression(@"/^\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{4}$/")]
public string Assessment_Date { get; set; }

and in the Edit view, I have the following validation message line:

@Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Assessment_Date, "mm/dd/yyyy", new { @class = "text-danger" })

The result is that it fails everything I type into the box, even if it's a correctly formatted date, like 01/02/2017.

I checked the RegularExpression on Online regex tester and debugger: PHP, PCRE, Python, Golang and JavaScript[^] and the RegularExpression is allowing correctly-formatted dates like the one above.

What might be the reason why this RegularExpression is failing in MVC? I placed the @ sign before the quotes containing the RegularExpression; otherwise, it complains about unrecognized escape codes. I've had trouble in the past with RegularExpressions too. Is there some trick to getting them to work with MVC? Thanks.

What I have tried:

RegularExpression to format date string to mm/dd/yyyy
See above.