#104 – Using FindName to Find Named Children of a Control

When you create a XAML file for WPF in the normal Visual Studio environment, any control for which you provide a Name property will automatically get a backing variable defined that will let you reference the instance of that control directly from your code-behind.

But there are times when you don’t already have a reference variable pointing to a particular control, but only to the root element that exists at the top of the XAML file.  Instead of trying to navigate all the way down from the root element to the child that you’re looking for, you can use the FindName method.

In the example below, our root element is a Window and we want to get a reference to a child Label control that exists as a descendent of the window instance.

 Label myLabel = (Label)this.FindName("label1");

We pass in the name of the control, which we set in the XAML with the Name property.