How can I find WPF controls by name or type?

Question

I need to search a WPF control hierarchy for controls that match a given name or type. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Whilst I love recursion in general, it's not as efficient as iteration when programming in C#, so perhaps the following solution is neater than the one suggested by John Myczek? This searches up a hierarchy from a given control to find an ancestor control of a particular type.

public static T FindVisualAncestorOfType(this DependencyObject Elt)
    where T : DependencyObject
{
    for (DependencyObject parent = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(Elt);
        parent != null; parent = VisualTreeHelper.GetParent(parent))
    {
        T result = parent as T;
        if (result != null)
            return result;
    }
    return null;
}

Call it like this to find the Window containing a control called ExampleTextBox:

Window window = ExampleTextBox.FindVisualAncestorOfType();