Visual Studio 2010 also has a XAML editor, yes, but I think it would be fair to say that it is not as "polished" as the Editor in Visual Studio 2012. Still perfectly functional for what you would need for this though, and it would save you having to learn another IDE for now.

MVVM can be thought of as a discipline yes, but it does have some immediate benefits as well. For instance, if you wanted to switch out the UI for the application, let's say you wanted to have a Windows Phone Application, a Silverlight Application, a WPF application, an Android Application, and iOS application, if coded correctly, all the "business" logic of talking to the service would be done within the ViewModel. Then all you would need to do would be to swap out the View portion, and you would have extensive code re-use.

Now, that is a bit of sweeping statement, and all the pieces aren't quite there yet, but if you start to get into that mentality, then when all the pieces do come together, it opens up the possibility of "write once, deploy everywhere".

There is some really good work happening with Xamarin and MVVMCross, and others, you make this a reality. If you are interested, watch this video:

http://slodge.blogspot.com/2013/04/n...n-n1-days.html

Blew my mind when I saw it!

Gary