Getting details on current VS background operation (non-informative Ready status)

Question

Once a project is loaded, Visual Studio often does something in the background while the status bar animated icon says Ready. Sometimes it shows a progress bar icon but with no actual progress done for hours, at the same time refusing to debug or build. It just hangs like that. See screenshot.

Building the solution shows an output line "build started at......". And that's it. Both the progress bar icon and the build icon are animated but no actual progress is shown for hours and no other output is made anywhere. Solution does not build, rebuild, clean, deploy or whatever.

It says "Ready" but it's definitely not ready. Where is more information on what it's doing?

Answer 1

Hello @MSCollege3000 ,

You can try following methods to monitor the progress and check the cause.

1. While building, maybe you can enable following option to check the detailed output information. Tools => Options => Projects and Solutions => Build And Run => MSBuild project build output verbosity => change to Detailed or Diagnostic. While you are building your project, check the Output window of Visual Studio.
2. Directly click the "Ready" icon and see if there’s any running task in the background.
3. Run devenv.exe /log command, reproduce the issue, close VS and check the log file(ActivityLog.xml file) in %AppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\17.0_<InstanceID> folder.
4. Download and use Windows Process Monitor tool to check Visual Studio(devenv.exe) operations.
5. Consider some additional causes, such as extensions, NuGet packages restoring, waiting for accessing to some resources(files), and specific project/solution settings…

Best Regards,

Tianyu

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