See this example, just do the same to your object tag instead:
http://delphi.about.com/cs/adptips2004/a/bltip0304_2.htm
Basically you can do this with just about any tag, set an id and
runat="server" on it and create the code-behind variable manually.
However, VS.NET will sometimes remove these modifications when switching
from design to code view, so be aware of that...
