Sitecore Experience Commerce - BootStrapping Commerce Services Error

When installing Sitecore Experience Commerce 9.0 on a local environment, the following error occurred:

BootStrapping Commerce Services: http://localhost:5005/commerceops/Bootstrap()
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Command start time: 20180111100414
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PS>TerminatingError(Invoke-RestMethod): "The remote server returned an error: (500) Internal Server Error."

This drills down to the Customer.Sample.Solution.sln solution which was compiled into a zip file and placed in C:\MyDeploy\Content\Engine. At the time of writing, the reference projects inside this solution were using the .NET Framework 4.6.2 which need to be updated to 4.7. This can be achieved by installing the dev pack for .NET Framework 4.7 and changing the target framework for the solutions using Visual Studio 2017.

Changing the target framework to 4.7

The solution can then be re-published and placed in the correct directory (inside a zip file).