VisualTreeHelper not finding children of DependencyObject, How can I reliably find objects?

Question

I have a UserControl called ZoneContainer. This has a property that which contains a ListBox containing a number of ListItems. Each ListItem contains a DockPanel.

I'm trying to use a the following code to find the children that exist inside ZoneContainer but childrenCount is 0 every time.

var parent = this as DependencyObject; // I can see that this is populated.

int childrenCount = VisualTreeHelper.GetChildrenCount(parent);

Is there another way to find a specific child object inside a list of objects? Ultimately I'm trying to find the DockPanel, but it's not finding any children even though I know they're in the object.

Answer 1

I resolved this issue by querying the objects rather than crawling the visual tree.

var header = container.ListBox.Items.Cast<ListBoxItem>()
    .Select(item => (MyType) item.Content)
    .FirstOrDefault(myType => myType.dpHeader.Name == "whatever").dpHeader;