I've recently spoken to more and more people who are working with PhoneGap on Windows, so I'm trying to get my own environment (well, my own virtual environment) up to shape. I even have an application I'd like to put out on the Windows app store. I ran into some significant issues with it (the app, not PhoneGap in general) with 2.9 but decided to try it again with 3. I ran into an interesting issue and I want to share it in case others run into it as well.

One of the coolest things about the PhoneGap CLI is that it tells you what SDKs it is ready to use locally. It's a quick way to see if you've got your crap set up right. Here is what I see on my Mac.

Awesome, right? But here is what I see in Windows:

Oh, sad face. Seeing all those question marks, my assumption was that the CLI wasn't able to determine if the SDKs were available or not. Fair enough. I figured I'd check the docs and see if I missed something.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be something far weirder. Captain Obvious (no, seriously, that's his/her name in the Google Group) pointed out that those question marks were actually high ASCII characters. Sending the result of the PhoneGap CLI to a text file and opening with Notepad++ reveals the truth:

Boom. This is already filed as a bug (Issue 155) if you want to track it. I'm still having issues with the CLI on Windows, so expect a follow up later this week.