Good things take time, luck and sometimes diligent work by others

For nearly a year the Exia project was on hold, victim of a crippling bug which we couldn’t track down, which occurred intermittently, and which rendered Exia useless. Those of you who have downloaded our demo from the Exia site have probably experienced it. After working in Exia for any arbitrary amount of time, the connection to TFS is suddenly lost and the application prompts for your credentials. You enter your credentials but the application crashes anyway.

Because Exia compliments TFS and Visual Studio, Microsoft has a strong interest in Exia, so we were invited to do a major presentation to Microsoft. The audience included Aaron Bjork, Tony Goodhew, Anthony Cangialosi, Tom Lindeman, Peter Larsen, Buck Hodges and Siddharth Bhatia. Exia crashed every three minutes. Nobody was impressed and the only consolation was that they realized it could possibly be a Microsoft related issue. But nobody could pin it down.

The bug was so elusive and difficult to reproduce that we were really stuck. No product. No chance for sales. No potential for growth. Nothing. Nada.

Then suddenly, thanks to the diligent work of a Microsoft expert named Miha Markic in solving a similar bug and posting the simple solution here, and the blind luck that I happened to hit that page in relation to something completely unrelated, our bug was solved.

Thanks to Miha for saving Exia. We are back in development again. For everyone who’s been watching our progress toward release, we apologize for the 9 month delay. We expect a stable and usable Exia early next quarter and look forward to getting successive trial versions in your hands via the Exia site.

Nigel