Advantages of routed events

From - http://joshsmithonwpf.wordpress.com/2007/06/22/overview-of-routed-events-in-wpf/

The routed notification pattern has many benefits.  One very important benefit of routed events is that a high-level visual element in a UI need not explicitly hook the same event on all of its descendants, such as MouseMove.  Instead it can hook the event on itself, and when the mouse moves over one of its descendants, the high level element will be notified appropriately.

Another important advantage of routed events is that elements at all levels of the visual tree can execute code in response to events of their descendants, without expecting the descendant to notify them when the event fires.   An ancestor element which hooks a tunneling event can even prevent its descendants from ever receiving both the tunneling and bubbling events at all (although it is possible for an element to demand that it is notified of the event, regardless of it is handled or not).