So its monday and we are arguing about coding practises. The examples here are a litttle too simple, but the real deal has several constructors. In order to initialise the simple values (eg dates to their min value) I have moved the code out of the constructors and into the field definitions.

public class ConstructorExample
{
    string _string = "John";

}

public class ConstructorExample2
{
    string _string;

    public ConstructorExample2()
    {
        _string = "John";
    }
}

How should it be done by the book. I tend to be very case by case and so am maybe a little lax abotu this kind of thing. However i feel that accams razor tells me to move the initialisation out of multiple constructors. Of course I could always move this shared initialisation into a private method.

The question is essentially ... is initialising fields where they are defined as opposed to the constructor bad in any way?

The argument I am facing is one of error handling, but i do not feel it is relevant as there are no possible exceptions that won't be picked up at compile time.