Finding controls on a Windows's form

The task of dynamically finding of a control of your own Form is a good sign of wrong design.

The code you reference is not very good (see some criticism in comments), but the idea is working. Major problem here is: why finding it by the property Name? Nothing guarantees it is unique in the scope of the Form. You can create and abstract predicate (int the form of method, for example) and pass this predicate as a delegate instance. In particular, you can use combination of the Control's Type (using "is" operator) and something else (Name again).

There is nothing new in v.4.0 which could help you compared to v.3.5. If you compare with v.2.0, the new feature is lambda expression with would help you to shorted up syntax of the anonymous method you would use for the predicate (delegate instance). This is really minor feature; you can use anonymous method in v.2.0 using delegate keyword and syntax.

More important thing would be using alternative design. If you can explain your ultimate goal of finding of the control, perhaps I would be able to direct you in right direction.

[UPDATE]

Additional concerns based on OP's clarification:

Just writing some code for a button is a very poor justification for the search (even though the search will work, it is completely pointless).

You need to apply different criteria based on names. Why? (I explained the issue with names.) You can use instances themselves in compile time. You have all instances as the Form field during compile time. You will not shorten your code using names. Instead, create N Button arrays our of M buttons, N < M. Group those buttons by the code used to setup them — the Buttons requiring identical code goes to the same array. Loop you code through each array.

Another approach: 15 buttons is already too many for Designer! It makes your code not maintainable. Remove them all from the designer, design just panels and layout. Add the buttons during run-time (use MyPanel.Controls.Add), design proper initialization, calculate coordinates of each Button in the array. Call your setup method from you Form constructor, at the very end. I would prefer this method.

Also, having so many buttons at the same form will drive your user crazy. Anything more than 5-6 is too many. Consider merging all buttons in one (some "Execute command" button) combined with the ListBox of commands. There are many other designs based on selection: TreeView, ListView, DataGrid and more. Menu, after all. Many buttons is a sign of bad design. Look at Visual Studio. How many buttons can you see? And this is quite good design.

—SA

Hi,
Try the following methods to get all the control in a winform.

public static List<Control> GetControls(Control form)
{
    var controlList = new List<Control>();
    foreach (Control childControl in form.Controls)
    {
        // Recurse child controls.
        controlList.AddRange(GetControls(childControl));
        controlList.Add(childControl);
    }
    return controlList;
}

You can use following code to find any control

                   //"this" is Form control
Control [] buttons= this.Controls.Find("btnabc", true);
  foreach (var btn in buttons)
  {
      btn.Text = "new text";
  }