I have code like (this is just an example):

protected void SomeGridView_RowDataBound(Object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{

  if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
  {
    e.Row.Cells[8].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red;
  }
}

Not supported!  or at least this is not something you can do easily.  I would not say it is imposible because the column names are certainly there and you could create some sort of hack where you have enum which would still ref the cell id but use a name.  I can almost envision some code written in javascript to deal with this. You could look and see if anyone has extended the grid to have this type of name relationship. 

Even better!  why don't you look into creating an extention of the GridView with that capability?

For the time being I'll just use a constant to avoid a magic number in my code:

protected void SomeGridView_RowDataBound(Object sender, GridViewRowEventArgs e)
{

  const int MY_COLUMN = 8;

  if (e.Row.RowType == DataControlRowType.DataRow)
  {
    e.Row.Cells[MY_COLUMN].BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Red;
  }
}