What are the problems of the MVVM pattern?

Question

Is Model-View-ViewModel the best pattern to use in WPF? Are there any downsides?

Answer 1

Yes, it's an overkill for small hello world-style applications.

Answer 2

Here's a good, short blog post on the advantages and disadvantages of MVVM, straight from John Gossman himself.

His main disadvantages are:

"For simple UI, M-V-VM can be overkill. In bigger cases, it can be hard to design the ViewModel up front in order to get the right amount of generality. Data-binding for all its wonders is declarative and harder to debug than nice imperative stuff where you just set breakpoints"

Answer 3

It is a great pattern and frankly one of the few flushed UI out patterns for WPF. What I mean by that is that many people understand and have adopted it. Therefore it's relatively easy to get help and information on it.

The biggest downside in my opinion is that it increases the number of classes and components in your application. That being said, I think it is worth it.