Silverlight: Access template control programmatically

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 the control name matches  

           if  ((control as  DependencyObject).GetValue(NameProperty).ToString() == name)

               return  control;

           else  //Search Recursively if not found

           {

               control = GetChildControl(control as  DependencyObject, name);

               if  (control != null )

                         return  control;

           }

       }

             return  null ;

   }

You can get the reference of the control searching against its name.

CheckBox checkBox = (CheckBox)GetChildControl(this,"chkAll");