@MrWilder said:<font face="Arial" size="2">Do you have a public constructor at all ? Are you just relying on the static method to provide an instance of the class? Is this a common design pattern?</font>No public ctor. the static "factory" method hands out all instances.This gives me the opportunity to perform additional checks (security, etc.) and to return a different type (a subclass perhaps...) and to catch exceptions and return null instead of throwing the exception to the caller.The caller's syntax is a little more verbose, but I like the flexibility.