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5 Best MVVM Frameworks and NuGet Packages To Choose From

· Web Development
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Being a developer, at least once throughout your existing career, you must have definitely thought about creating the most sophisticated applications to delight your users or clients, or something for your own satisfaction. In most cases, you might have been able to achieve it on the first release of the application.

However, when a new feature addition comes, fixing the bug without putting a lot of brainstorming into the structure of the application code can become stress-inducing due to code complexity.

Hence, there is always a need for good clean structure of code.

And that is exactly why you need MVVM. It helps reducing code complexity and maintain a clean and reusable structure of your code.

One of the most well-structured and the most reusable way to organize your code is to use the 'MVVM' pattern. The Model, View, ViewModel is about guiding developers involved in MVVM application development in how to organize and structure the code in order to write maintainable, testable, and extensible applications.

Model − It simply holds the data and has nothing to do with any of the business logic.

ViewModel − It acts as the link/connection between the Model and View and makes stuff look pretty.

View − It simply holds the formatted data and essentially delegates everything to the Model.

Let’s look at some of the important frameworks which you might use for MVVM application development.

Catel
Catel is not just an MVVM toolkit but also includes user controls and multiple enterprise library classes. It offers toolkit that differs itself from other frameworks of the simplicity and solves the "nested user control" problem with dynamic viewmodels for user controls

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Simple MVVM Toolkit
Simple MVVM Toolkit aides in developing Silverlight, WPF, and WP7 applications by using the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern. The sole purpose of this toolkit is to provide a simple framework and a set of tools for getting up to speed quickly with applications based on the MVVM design pattern. Its main focus is on simplicity, but it contains everything you need to implement MVVM for real-world line of business applications.

Clinch
Cinch is a MVVM framework exposing a number of helper classes that allows the developers to get to grips promptly by creating scalable testable MVVM frameworks in no time.

Caliburn.Micro
This is a small, yet powerful implementation of Caliburn designed for WPF, Silverlight, and WP7, that implements a variety of UI patterns for solving real-world problems. To name some of the patterns: MVC, MVP, Presentation Model (MVVM), and Application Controller.

WAF
We are talking about the WPF Application Framework (WAF), which is a lightweight framework allowing you to create well structured WPF Applications and supporting you to apply a Layered Architecture and the Model-View-ViewModel (aka MVVM, M-V-VM, PresentationModel) pattern.

Now, let us look at some of the best NuGet MVVM packages

ReactiveUI.Testing:- A library to aid in writing unit tests for ReactiveUI projects

Caliburn.Micro:- A small, yet powerful framework designed for Xaml platforms.

Caliburn.Micro implements a variety of UI patterns for solving real-world problems.

PropertyChanged.Fody:- Add property notification to all classes that implement INotifyPropertyChanged.

DotVVM:- DotVVM is an open source ASP.NET-based framework which allows to build modern web apps without writing any JavaScript code.

Prism.Core:- Prism is a fully open source version of the Prism guidance originally produced by Microsoft Patterns & Practices. Prism provides an implementation of a collection of design patterns that are helpful in writing well structured and maintainable XAML applications.

Conclusion
Over the years, MVVM has changed the way developers write and think about code. With inputs and contributions coming from a strong community, MVVM has matured incrementally through these years.