If I am generating POCO objects from EntityFramework, and using these to go to/from the WCF server, is there any reason to create client-side Models for the Views & ViewModels to use instead of just using the POCOs directly?
Almost all the MVVM examples I have looked at bind straight to the object returned from the WCF service. Is this good practice? Are there arguments that can be made for actually mapping the POCO to a Model and having the Views/ViewModels working with the Model object instead of the POCO?
The main reason I could think of is validation, however since the EF POCOs are partial classes, they can be expanded on to include validation.
EDIT
Most answers so far have brought up INotifyPropertyChanged
as the main reason to build a separate Model. Does your answer change if you are using Self-Tracking entities instead of POCOs which already includes INotifyPropertyChanged
? STEs are also partial classes which can be expanded upon to include validation.