If you are working on a Silverlight application, it's very imperative that you will end up wanting to assess a control from a design template. Let's say I have a template where a CheckBox control is defined and if I want to access this control in my code behind, there is no direct way to do it. ... < ControlTemplate .. > < Grid >... < CheckBox x : Name ="chkAll" ... /> </ Grid > </ ControlTemplate /> ... The following method will recursively look for this control hiding anywhere in the control template against its name and return it when found. private object GetChildControl( DependencyObject parent, string name) { Object control = null ; int count = VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(parent); for ( int counter = 0; counter < count; counter++) { control = VisualTreeHelper.GetChild(parent, counter); //name supplied then Return Control if t