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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:

enter image description here

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.

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  • That means the project is building.
    – BJ Myers
    Commented May 12, 2017 at 22:40
  • The weird thing is it's a trivial project that should build in five secs or less and vs kept showing this animated icon for several minutes. So it must be doing more than compiling. But how do I see what it's doing?
    – RonC
    Commented May 12, 2017 at 22:51
  • When a project is loaded VS has to parse through the project file(s) and resolve a bunch of things. Such as check references are in place and so on, this is likely what causes a longer than expected initial process. I have a well-specced dev machine that this is barely noticeable on, one of my test machines has pretty low resources though and loading a project takes forever.
    – Toby
    Commented Aug 23, 2017 at 9:45
  • I think there is more to this. I have a project that is having this issue that both builds and rebuilds typically instantly. But today, it is taking more than 2 full minutes in VS and only displaying this icon with no status. VS is pretty much "hung up" at this point providing no data as to what it is doing.
    – Matt
    Commented Apr 4, 2019 at 17:23

2 Answers 2

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You may notice that suddenly a project that normally builds quickly is taking a long time to build.

I've now personally been caught by this about 3 times myself.

This can occur in VS 2017 because VS 2017 has code analysis available. If you compile your project using "Debug with code analysis instead of "Debug" selected this will run full code analysis on your code during the build process.

code analysis

I just opened a project that i havent opened for awhile and "debug with code analysis" was the default option when i opened it. So this caught me just a few minutes ago.

What makes this confusing is that the drop down box in visual studio is not very wide. So it is often difficult to see that you are compiling with code analysis because the text is cut off as can be seen in this image below and a developer only sees "Debug w" and they don't realize they are compiling with code analysis.

enter image description here

Hope that helps.

thanks Matt

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It isn't about downloading. Visual Studio 2017 (and earlier versions as well) shows this icon in the status bar during the building process.

You can see more information in the Output window, click View → Output

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