Recently I was looking for a way to retrieve a particular column based on it's column name (instead of fixed cellnumber) when a row in a GridView has been selected. I came up with the following which does the trick:

protected void gvGeneratedReports_SelectedIndexChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)

{

    GridView gv = (GridView)sender;

    DataRowView rowView = (DataRowView)gv.SelectedRow.DataItem;

    string outputType = rowView["OutputType"].ToString();

}