I believe you can make the body tag 'runat="server"', then you need an instance of HtmlGenericControl for the body tag. Then you can use the attributes collection to set the attribute. Some like this...
<body runat="server" id="tagBody">
Protected tagBody As System.Web.UI.HtmlControls.HtmlGenericControl
tagBody.Attributes.Item("bgColor") = "gray"
|