What makes MVVM uniquely suited to WPF?
- by Reed Copsey
The Model-View-ViewModel is very popular with WPF and Silverlight. I've been using this for my most recent projects, and am a very large fan.
I understand that it's a refinement of MVP. However, I am wondering exactly what unique characteristics of WPF (and Silverlight) allow MVVM to work, and prevent (or at least make difficult) this pattern from working using other frameworks or technologies.
I know MVVM has a strong dependency on the powerful data binding technology within WPF. This is the one feature which many articles and blogs seem to mention as being the key to WPF providing the means of the strong separation of View from ViewModel. However, data binding exists in many forms in other UI frameworks. There are even projects like Truss that provide WPF-style databinding to POCO in .NET.
What features, other than data binding, make WPF and Silverlight uniquely suited to Model-View-ViewModel?