The first thing we need to do is to download the .NET Core SDK, unless the release we want to use is already shipped with Visual Studio 2017. We can download the latest version from either the official Microsoft URL, that is, https://www.microsoft.com/net/core, or from the official GitHub project page, at https://github.com/dotnet/cli/tree/v2.0.3#installers-and-binaries.

The installation is very straightforward, just follow the wizard until the end to get the job done:

Once installed, launch Visual Studio 2017 and create a new ASP.NET Core Web Application project. Let's do that by following the mentioned steps:

1. Fire up Visual Studio 2017 and, from the File menu, expand New and select Project to open a New Project modal window.
2. From the Templates tree, expand the Visual C# node and select the Web subfolder; the right section of the modal window will be populated by a number of available project templates. Among these, there are two choices for creating an ASP.NET Core Web Application project: .NET Core and .NET Framework, as we can see in the following diagram:

3. The first one, optimized for cross-platform deployment, entirely relies upon the new .NET Core framework; the latter, ideal for a Windows environment, is based upon the latest .NET Framework version (4.6.2 at the time of writing) instead.

4. Select the ASP.NET Core Web Application (.NET Core) template and fill the relevant Name, Location, and Solution name fields; set TestMakerFreeWebApp as Project Name and TestMakerFree as Solution name, just to not confuse them, and then click on OK to continue.
5. In the next modal window, we can further customize our template by choosing the default contents to include in our project (Empty, Web API, or Web Application) and the authentication mechanism, should we want to use one. Select .NET Core and ASP.NET Core 2.0 from the drop-down list, and then select the Angular template icon with No Authentication; the Enable Docker Support checkbox, if present, should be disabled by default. Eventually, click on the OK button to create the project:

Those who're used to the Visual Studio Web Application Project templates for the previous ASP.NET versions will be tempted to choose Empty instead, thus avoiding the insane amount of sample classes, folders, and components, including a number of potentially outdated versions of various client-side frameworks such as Bootstrap, KnockoutJS, JQuery, and more. Luckily enough, these new ASP.NET Core project templates are quite lightweight and just ship the required files, resources, and dependencies to the project to Bootstrap a sample template based on the chosen client-side technology:

In our specific case, our template will set up a rather clean working environment containing the following:

• The default ASP.NET MVC /Controllers/ and /Views/ folders, with some sample controllers and views
• The /ClientApp/ folder, with some TypeScript files containing the source code of a sample Angular app
• The /wwwroot/ folder, which will be used by VS2017 to build an optimized version of the client-side code whenever we need to execute it locally or have it published anywhere; that folder is initially empty, but it will be populated upon first-run

If we spend some time to browse through this folder and take a look at the content, we can see how the .NET Core developers did a tremendous job in easing the MVC-with-Angular setup and kickstart process. This template already supports SEO optimization and Server-Side Rendering (SSR), and also features a bunch of useful optimizations; those who fought with task runners and client-side building strategies in the recent past will most likely appreciate the fact that this template features a build process completely handled by NPM, Webpack, and .NET Core with specific loading strategies for development and production.