>>While the other advice you've been given is correct, unless there's a good reason, I'd add the property in the Form Designer and just assign it in Init.
>>
>>Tamar
>
>What would drive the decision to do it one way or another?
It being allowed/possible or not would influence it :).
Also, if the property is added at design time, it will pop up in the intellisense which would at least help you keep the spelling consistent. Also, if your code happens to fire in a wrong order (i.e. reference this object before it's instantiated), you'd get a different kind of error message :). That is, instead of "PEM not found" you'd get "is not an object". Third, if you add it at design time, then it can have _access and _assign methods - the former being a perfect place to instantiate it on demand.