WPF Commands vs Events Advantages/Disadvantages

Question

Can anyone tell me what are the advantages of using Commands vs Events in WPF. Do Commands or Events run into memory leaks? What is the fastest approach. What are their disadvantages.

Answer 1

Commands provide two main benefits over event handlers:

1. commands are not linked to the caller, so same command is not dependent and can be called from menu item, toolbar button, keyboard, etc.
2. commands provide support for enabling/disabling all related UI controls based on the status of command (can be executed or not)

I'd prefer using commands at real project, especially if you want to use M-V-VM.

I haven't heard about any memory leaks related with commands.

Events are probably faster, but the difference should not be significant - I've been using commands on my projects for 2 years and hadn't any performance issues with them.

For more details on commands see Commanding Overview(archive)(v4)

Answer 2

But although Commands and Events can be overlapping, they are two different things. Commands say "do this!", while events say "this just happened!". So you might have a CloseWindowCommand for closing a window, but the window might have a ClosingEvent that tells subscribing objects that is is closing.