All, I would like to know the recognised best approach/industry standard of launching [child] dialogs/windows from an WPF using the MVVM pattern. I have come across the foll
First of all, i don't know of any "industry-standard" way for showing dialogs using MVVM because there is no such thing.
Secondly, Welcome to MVVM, you have just touched on of the areas that MVVM don't have a standard for.
To tell you the truth, MVVM has many pain points and this is the reason why there are tons of MVVM frameworks out there, just to mention a few MVVM Light, PRISM, Caliburn.Micro, Cinch, Catel, WAF, Baboon, shell i stop or you want more.
Now to answer your question and after dealing with most of those frameworks, i noticed one commonality, they all use a DI/IoC container and then provide you with an interface, something like IDialogManager and an implementation of their own, and then they ask you to accept this interface in your view model and use it to show dialogs. So to sum this up, i would use dependency injection, have an interface for showing dialogs, and then provide and implementation of that, and register it with the di container and then consume it from my view model or views.
Edit: So you have picked PRISM (which in my opinion) is hardest between them all in showing dialogs. Now that's aside, there is the hard way which is by using Interaction Requests (check the middle of the article), or you can use this Answer as a quicker way.