How to get ALL child controls of a Windows Forms form of a specific type (Button/Textbox)?

Here's another option for you. I tested it by creating a sample application, I then put a GroupBox and a GroupBox inside the initial GroupBox. Inside the nested GroupBox I put 3 TextBox controls and a button. This is the code I used (even includes the recursion you were looking for)

public IEnumerable<Control> GetAll(Control control,Type type)
{
    var controls = control.Controls.Cast<Control>();

    return controls.SelectMany(ctrl => GetAll(ctrl,type))
                              .Concat(controls)
                              .Where(c => c.GetType() == type);
}

To test it in the form load event I wanted a count of all controls inside the initial GroupBox

private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    var c = GetAll(this,typeof(TextBox));
    MessageBox.Show("Total Controls: " + c.Count());
}

And it returned the proper count each time, so I think this will work perfectly for what you're looking for :)

In C# (since you tagged it as such) you could use a LINQ expression like this:

List<Control> c = Controls.OfType<TextBox>().Cast<Control>().ToList();

---

Edit for recursion:

In this example, you first create the list of controls and then call a method to populate it. Since the method is recursive, it doesn't return the list, it just updates it.

List<Control> ControlList = new List<Control>();
private void GetAllControls(Control container)
{
    foreach (Control c in container.Controls)
    {
        GetAllControls(c);
        if (c is TextBox) ControlList.Add(c);
    }
}

It may be possible to do this in one LINQ statement using the Descendants function, though I am not as familiar with it. See this page for more information on that.

Edit 2 to return a collection:

As @ProfK suggested, a method that simply returns the desired controls is probably better practice. To illustrate this I have modified the code as follows:

private IEnumerable<Control> GetAllTextBoxControls(Control container)
{
    List<Control> controlList = new List<Control>();
    foreach (Control c in container.Controls)
    {
        controlList.AddRange(GetAllTextBoxControls(c));
        if (c is TextBox)
            controlList.Add(c);
    }
    return controlList;
}

This is an improved version of the recursive GetAllControls() that actually works on private vars:

    private void Test()
    {
         List<Control> allTextboxes = GetAllControls(this);
    }
    private List<Control> GetAllControls(Control container, List<Control> list)
    {
        foreach (Control c in container.Controls)
        {
            if (c is TextBox) list.Add(c);
            if (c.Controls.Count > 0)
                list = GetAllControls(c, list);
        }

        return list;
    }
    private List<Control> GetAllControls(Control container)
    {
        return GetAllControls(container, new List<Control>());
    }