Visual Studio 2017 Icon with down arrow in status bar - what does it mean?

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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.

visual-studio-2017 visual-studio
2 Answers

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

user_6713430
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