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During the development of Catel, we tried to maintain this freedom aspect which is very important to us. Therefore, all functionality is loosely coupled. Sounds great, but everything is called loosely coupled nowadays. Catel contains a lot of different aspects, such as logging, diagnostics, Reflectionreflection, MVVM, user controls, windows, etc. All these aspects are complementary to each other, but the great thing about Catel is that you decide whether to use just one, some, or maybe all aspects.
As an example: you have a legacy application and want to use the DataWindow to write simple entry windows, but you are not ready for MVVM yet. No problem, the DataWindow is complementary to MVVM, but does not require it. Therefore, you have all the freedom to use just what you need, whenever you need it.
Most frameworks require a bootstrapper that completely decides how your application structure should look like. For example, your Views must have this name, your controls must have that name. Again, in Catel, we wanted to give you the freedom you would expect from a framework.
The great thing about this freedom is that the different aspects of Catel can be used side-by-side with other frameworks, so you as a developer can use the best framework for every aspect in your application.
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