I’ve been playing around with Laravel a bit just to try it out and figured I would bundle this with a light weight WAMP solution.  Went through the install and everything worked fine exept when it came time to migrate my database:

C:\UniServer\laravel1>php artisan migrate
{"error":{"type":"Symfony\\Component\\Debug\\Exception\\FatalErrorException","message":"Call to undefined function Symfony\\Component\\Console\\mb_detect_encoding()","file":"C:\\UniServer\\laravel1\\vendor\\symfony\\console\\Symfony\\Component\\Console\\Application.php","line":721}}

Took some googling around, but the solution was pretty easy.  Assuming you’re running a stock and fairly recent version of Uniform, all you have to do is modify your php-cli.ini file and add:

extension=php_mbstring.dll

Restart Apache and presto.

~david