I'm currently writing my first ASP.NET 2.0 website. VS.NET 2005 is worlds better than VS.NET 2003, but I was mildly surprised to find that Microsoft still hasn't added a recursive overload for Page.FindControl. So, courtesy of Oddur Magnusson, here it is:

private Control FindControlRecursive(Control root, string id)
{
if (root.ID == id)
{
return root;
}
foreach (Control c in root.Controls)
{
Control t = FindControlRecursive(c, id);
if (t != null)
{
return t;
}
}
return null;
}

This makes life much easier when you're trying to get to controls that are themselves contained within other containers, eg, a TextBox inside a DataView or DataList. Would it have killed Microsoft to add an overloaded, recursive version of this?

One interesting semi-undocumented feature of Page.FindControl: you can specify a full "path" to a control using colons as seperators, like so:

Page.FindControl("DataList1:_ctl0:TextBox3")

That's assuming all the containers in the hierarchy have explicit names. You can view source to determine what the dynamically generated 'null' IDs are.