If it clears things up at all.... If you ever write some C++ code using MFC (Microsoft's Foundation Class, essentially an OO wrapper around the WinAPI), you'll notice that there are always initialization routines aside from constructors (they're called OnInit...blah ). If you happen to use a dialog object, and attempt to draw from the constructor instead of the initialization routine, you'll notice that the objects exist but are not windows yet so you'll get an assertion (if running in debug mode). This means that the constructors have been called but nothing has been drawn yet. The drawing only occurs after all the constructors have been called, the initialization routines are systematically called after that and you can load all the widgets with whatever the default values to be displayed are. Moral of the story, drawing typically doesn't take place during construction of objects.