I had exactly the same problem when I first went through Prism.
Controllers
are basically for logic that spans an entire module, whereas Presenters
are for logic that is specific to a View
.
For example, a Presenter
would respond to a command that results in a button in the view being disabled. A Controller
would respond to a command that results in the View
(and Presenter
) being changed entirely, or perhaps loading a different View/Presenter in a different region in the module's shell.
Edit: As for when to use them, you can skip the Controller
entirely if you have no need for the orchestration mentioned above. The simplest application will just have a:
Module
: registers the view/presenter into the Region
Presenter
: responds to commands from the view and modifies the ViewModel
.
ViewModel
: adapter between Presenter
and View
that implements INotifyPropertyChanged
View
: binds to ViewModel
and displays UI
Edit: As for Presenter vs ViewModel, most of your logic should be in your Presenter. Think of your ViewModel as housing the logic for your view, but the Presenter as dealing with the consequences of interacting with the view.
For example, the user clicks the "Search" button in your View
. This triggers an ICommand
, which is handled by your Presenter
. The Presenter
begins the search and sets the ViewModel.IsSearching
property, which fires the PropertyChanged notification for CanSearch
. CanSearch
is a readonly property that is based on several other properties (eg. IsSearchEnabled && !IsSearching
). The "Search" button in the View
has its Enabled
property bound to CanSearch
.