I got in the habit of doing very little in constructors in C++ because they don't have a return value and it was difficult to know if an error occurred during the initialization process. But, this was back when exceptions only existed in the MFC library as primitive "set/jump" implementation (no clean up). In those days it made more sense to just initialize member varialbes and use a seperate init() method to do any heavy lifting. Then if something failed, the init() could return some meaningful information and the caller could do something intelligent. However, now with structured exception handling, garbage collection, etc, it's makes more sense to do the work in the constructor in most cases. Nevertheless, I'd still argue that it's not bad design to limit the constructor to simple variable initialization and seperate out more complex initialization operations to another step in some situations. I know, what situations? Any situation where you don't want to handle an error condition by simply throwing a exception to the caller.