As I was looking through SO I came across a question about handling multiple message types. My concern is - how do I load such a message in a neat way? I decided to have a separate class with a method which loads one message each time it's invoked. This method should create a new instance of a concrete message type (say AlphaMessage, BetaMessage, GammaMessage, etc.) and return it as a Message. class MessageLoader { public Message Load() { // ... } } The code inside the method is something which looks really awful to me and I would very much like to refactor it/get rid of it: Message msg = Message.Load(...); // load yourself from whatever source if (msg.Type == MessageType.Alpha) return new AlphaMessage(msg); if (msg.Type == MessageType.Beta) return new BetaMessage(msg); // ... In fact, if the whole design looks just too messy and you guys have a better solution, I'm ready to restructure the whole thing. If my description is too chaotic, please let me know what it's missing and I shall edit the question. Thank you all.