Sometimes in VS2017 Visual Studio takes forever to run a new project and all the while it is showing an icon in the bottom of the status bar that looks like this:

I would guess that this means that it's downloading something, but what? It's frustrating that Visual Studio doesn't provide better messaging about what's going on given that sometime the process may take five minutes or more and I'm not sure what it is doing.

What does this icon mean? And is there any way to see what Visual Studio is doing in such a situation?

I found a related question Visual Studio stuck initializing with strange icon in status bar but it does not answer my question.

Sometimes in VS2017 Visual Studio takes forever to run a new project and all the while it is showing an icon in the bottom of the status bar that looks like this:

I would guess that this means that it's downloading something, but what? It's frustrating that Visual Studio doesn't provide better messaging about what's going on given that sometime the process may take five minutes or more and I'm not sure what it is doing.

What does this icon mean? And is there any way to see what Visual Studio is doing in such a situation?

I found a related question Visual Studio stuck initializing with strange icon in status bar but it does not answer my question.