Just to focus discussion a little bit more. Windows comes into play in
my eyes only as GUI front-end to a ROS system running on a Linux-PC
equipped robot. Tools like roslaunch do not make any sense on windows
where I need to hide everything behind a shine GUI.

Of course it would be very nice to just compile ros libraries directly
with Visual Studio on windows. But maybe the mingw cross-compiler is the
best one can do right now. I would even link the whole ROS functionality
into a shared library build with mingw on Linux giving that shared
library an interface not using ros at all. That would mean I have to
translate messages into something usable in my windows application but
this has to be done anyway.

That leads to the question if it is possible to implement a ROS node
into a shared library and starting that node without roslaunch and
environment variables like ROS_MASTER_URI. Does anyone did something
like that already?
>
> Mingw is so incredibly slow on windows, I found the toolchain environ
> really nice when I discovered it. I even managed to get qt+mingw cross
> compiling, but qt isn't built well for cross-compiling - required so
> many hard code hacks to make it build properly I don't think I ever
> want to try sustaining that. I'd be interested to see how hard it is
> to cross-compile wxwidgets with mingw. At the very least, if we can
> get the ros libs and headers packaged up with the toolchain, windows
> development can just unpack these and build with qt or similar, within
> windows.
>
> Lots of questions, not many answers yet! 
>
> The willow garage guys have just opened up a new project on their code
> server - eros. It's goal is to assist with both cross compiling and
> anything related to using ros on embedded systems. The mingw toolchain
> is something I've wanted to look at as well, so if we can collate
> information there from various people doing testing, that'd be good -
> please sign up and let's use the mailing list/forums to jot notes if
> you're interested.
>
> p.s. Not much there yet sorry, only been two weeks and currently a bit
> bombed at work with projects closing and holidays approaching. Will
> have some good time for it when I take some leave, but should have
> ported some python scripts and patches to make cross-compiling easier
> (from our Yujin Robot packages) within a week or two.
>
> Regards,
> Daniel Stonier.
>