How to return HTTP 500 from ASP.NET Core RC2 Web Api?

You could use Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.ControllerBase.StatusCode and Microsoft.AspNetCore.Http.StatusCodes to form your response, if you don't wish to hardcode specific numbers.

return  StatusCode(StatusCodes.Status500InternalServerError);

UPDATE: Aug 2019

Perhaps not directly related to the original question but when trying to achieve the same result with Microsoft Azure Functions I found that I had to construct a new StatusCodeResult object found in the Microsoft.AspNetCore.Mvc.Core assembly. My code now looks like this;

return new StatusCodeResult(StatusCodes.Status500InternalServerError);

From what I can see there are helper methods inside the ControllerBase class. Just use the StatusCode method:

[HttpPost]
public IActionResult Post([FromBody] string something)
{    
    //...
    try
    {
        DoSomething();
    }
    catch(Exception e)
    {
         LogException(e);
         return StatusCode(500);
    }
}

You may also use the StatusCode(int statusCode, object value) overload which also negotiates the content.