MVVM Light Toolkit (GalaSoft) vs. MVVM Toolkit (WPF Toolkit)?

Question

I am new to MVVM and now trying to get involved.
The lack of official support for MVVM in the .NET and the IDE (templates, generators) is very disapointing.

I was doubting what tool is better from these:

• MVVM Light Toolkit
• MVVM Toolkit (from the WPF Toolkit)

My considerations are:

1. What has more features, capabilities, better performance, easiness of maintainance etc.
2. What has more chance to be officially supported by MSFT in future versions of the BCL so I should get familiar with

Answer 1

Is quite easy question.

The one from WPF Toolkit was updated in may 2009 (near 2 years) and when I tried it, I got some problems with localized editions of VS2008 (don't know how it works on 2010).

MVVM Light have more life, Laurent is always working on it and he is actually working on a sweet v4 that will rocks.

On the other hand, MVVM Light works for WPF/SL/WP7, it have more features and is still very easy to use.

If that is not enough, MVVM Light is growing so fast, the people are starting to create a bunch of apps using it and even you can see Microsoft conferences using MVVM Light as the MVVM Toolkit.

You need more?

PS: Dont be worried about your second consideration. MVVM itself, the idea, is not that hard, is just a design pattern.

If one day you want another MVVM Toolkit, you will see that is the same thing, if Laurent use on MVVM Light a Messenger, on Prism for example you will find the same idea under "EventAggregator".

In short, same ideas but different complexity and talking about something powerful and easy, Mvvm Light.

Answer 2

If you want to do development for WPF, Silverlight or WP7, consider that MVVM-Light has templates for creating ViewModels and Views for all three, as well as good code snippets. I haven't used the other so can't comment on it, but if it doesn't have that it may be harder to use.