Microsoft's ViewModelBase class for MVVM?

Question

For WPF programming with MVVM most people seem to write their own ViewModelBase class and other MVVM framework classes, or use one of the many third-party ones. But the other day I was googling for something and I found this on the MSDN -

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/LIBRARY/hh721872%28v=vs.110%29

... so does Microsoft already supply an MVVM framework, or is this something new for Visual Studio 2012? It says Visual Studio 2012 in the corner but I didn't know if that meant new for VS 2012. (I have VS 2010)

Is this something I can use instead of writing my own or downloading a 3rd party one?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

If you take a trip up the namespace hierarchy

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/LIBRARY/bb130146.aspx

You can see these types are designed for use when extending Team Foundation Server. So, no, this is not meant to be used for your WPF applications.

However, you probably could create WPF applications which use these types. But then, I'm not sure if the licensing for these assemblies would allow you to deploy them on a machine without TFS, or if you can deliver the assemblies outside of the SDK installer. A quick search didn't reveal anything. Probably the SDK has licensing details, which I don't currently have installed.

Assuming you can and they do, does the effort this has already cost overcome replacing code which is, essentially, trivial to write? Or that has been written tens of times in different frameworks, practically all of which are available through NuGet?