Creating your first app

Create a new project and select the ASP.NET Core Web Application template. You can run this on .NET Core or on .NET Framework (but then it won't run on other platforms). If you wish to create a new Git repository for distributed version control, then check the Add to Source Control box:

On the next screen, you can select a Web Application template. This includes web apps, APIs, and SPA services for Angular and React. The templates are the same as used by command-line tooling and you can create them using either interface. Later in this chapter, we'll see how to use the command-line, as it is almost identical on every platform.

Select the standard Web Application template:

Click on the Change Authentication button to alter the way the users log in to your site. Select Individual User Accounts but leave the data stored locally. Alternatively, you could connect to cloud services, as shown in the following image, but we won't cover this here:

Once you have created your application, VS will restore the NuGet packages in the background. When this is done, press F5 to build and run your app in the debugger. Your default browser should open containing the ASP.NET Core template site, and VS will show graphs of performance tracing:

Congratulations! You've just created an ASP.NET Core 2 web app.