ViewModels or ViewBag?

Question

I\'m fairly new to MVC4, EF5 and ASP.Net, and I don\'t seem to be able to find a good answer anywhere.

Basically, Should everything be done through the viewmodel or

Answer 1

Prefer ViewModels over the ViewBag wherever you can. Create Strongly typed views. It makes your code cleaner, less fragile, less error-prone, and easy to maintain.

ViewBags are just dictionaries of dynamically typed objects so you lose:

• Compile time checking
• The ability to refactor with confidence (you lose the support of the tools)
• IDE support - such as the ability to navigate to all usages
• Intellisense

For bonus points making extensive use of the ViewBag also misses the point of using the MVC pattern

I get the impression ViewBags were created to solve an edge-case problem in asp.net and people use them instead of creating view models as was originally intended in the design of the platform, to the detriment of their work.

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with thanks to Why not to use ViewBag heavily?