How to create .NET Platform Standard project

You can follow this Create .NET Standard Packages with Visual Studio 2015

From the article:

This guide will walk you through creating a nuget package targeting .NET Standard Library 1.4. This will work across .NET Framework 4.6.1, Universal Windows Platform 10, .NET Core, and Mono/Xamarin.

If you create a PCL project and then double click properties, you should see an option to change your target platform. That will let you choose a .net standard version. Same thing as doing it yourself in the project.json but is the closest thing I have found so far to having a VS template do it for you