We are going to create the ASP.NET Core and React projects separately in this chapter. In Chapter 1, Understanding the ASP.NET Core React Template, we discovered that old versions of React and create-react-app were used. Creating the React project separately allows us to use a more recent version of React and create-react-app. Creating the React project separately also allows us to use TypeScript with React, which will help us be more productive as the code base grows.

Let's open Visual Studio and carry out the following steps to create our ASP.NET Core backend:

1. In the startup dialog, select Create a new project:

2. Choose ASP.NET Core Web Application in the wizard that opens and click the Next button:

3. Create a folder called backend in an appropriate location.
4. Name the project QandA and choose the backend folder location to save the project. Tick Place solution and project in the same directory and click the Create button to create the project:

5. Now, another dialog will appear that will allow us to specify the version of ASP.NET Core we want to use, as well as the specific type of project we want to create. Select ASP.NET Core 3.0 as the version and API in the dialog and click the Create button, which will create the project: 

6. After the project is created, open Startup.cs and move the app.UseHttpsRedirection() line of code so that it is not used while in development:

public void Configure(IApplicationBuilder app, IWebHostEnvironment env)
{
  if (env.IsDevelopment())
  {
    app.UseDeveloperExceptionPage();
  }
  else
  {
    app.UseHttpsRedirection();
  }
  
  app.UseRouting();

  ...
}

We have made this change because, in development mode, our frontend will use the HTTP protocol. By default, the Firefox browser doesn't allow network requests for an app that has a different protocol to the backend. Due to this, we want the frontend and backend to use the HTTP protocol in development mode.

That's the only change we are going to make to our backend in this chapter. In the next section, we'll create the React frontend project.