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Did you also install the .Net Core 2.0 SDK?

Not yet, and I was thinking that this might be the issue - would you expect this to be required?

dotnet --version shows 1.1.0, I think I assumed that the latest VS2017 would have the latest dotnet core but this doesn't seem to be the case.

This is a common misconception, VS2017 doesn't ship with the .Net Core SDK, you need to manually install it seperatly. This is also described in the Book: https://nbarbettini.gitbooks.io/little-asp-net-core-book/con...

Thanks for pointing this out, this did indeed fix the problem. Somewhere in the installation I had ended up with 1.1 but it works fine now.