What are some of the challenges while using ROS on Windows?

General
1

I am a product manager and I am trying to understand what are the challenges that developers face while building their robotics applications in general and specifically around using ROS on windows.
What is your checklist for get your dev environment ready?
How easy of difficult is it to incorporate ROS nodes into your app especially on Windows?
How do you go about testing and simulating your code?
How do you deploy your code to your robots? Do you use a CI/CD pipeline?
How do you update your applications once deployed on to robots.

Forgive me if this seems too high level for dev forum. Appreciate your inputs.

2

For ROS 1, support for Windows is not very good, though there are some resources:

~~http://wiki.ros.org/win_ros~~

But I would not expect things to just work.

Edit: Actually Microsoft has spent a lot of time improving things recently, as @gerkey pointed out:

For ROS 2, we have official support for Windows. You can expect most things to work and you can use cmake to make your own packages and develop them with visual studio or what ever you prefer:

https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Installation/Dashing/

3

While, as @wjwwood notes, we haven’t historically supported ROS 1 on Windows, our friends at Microsoft have made a lot of progress in that direction over the past year: https://microsoft.github.io/Win-RoS-Landing-Page/.

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4

Yes, sorry, I forgot a lot of progress has been made there in the last few years. My mistake.

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