Locate nested controls easily

Finding controls within a Page's control hierarchy can be painful but if you know how the controls are nested you can use the lesser known "$" shortcut to find controls without having to write recursive code.  If you're looking for a great way to recursively find a control (in cases where you don't know the exact control nesting) check out my good buddy Michael Palermo's blog entry. The following example shows how to use the DefaultFocus property to set the focus on a textbox that is nested inside of a FormView control.  Notice that the "$" is used to delimit the nesting:

<form id="form1" runat="server" DefaultFocus="formVw$txtName">
    <div>
        <asp:FormView ID="formVw" runat="server">
            <ItemTemplate>
                Name:
                <asp:TextBox ID="txtName" runat="server"
                    Text='<%# Eval("FirstName") + " " + Eval("LastName") %>' />
            </ItemTemplate>
        </asp:FormView>
    </div></form>

This little trick can also be used on the server-side when calling FindControl().  I blogged about this awhile back if you'd like more details.  Here's an example:

TextBox tb = this.FindControl("form1$formVw$txtName") as TextBox;
if (tb != null)
{
    //Access TextBox control}