This is the first of a 3 part series to detail how to use Mono to host ASP.NET applications on Linux and Mac OSX.  We are using Visual Studio Community 2013 to develop our sample ASP.NET MVC WebApi application.  Visual Studio Community 2013 defaulted to .NET framework 4.5 when we created the new project.   We quickly realized that Mono 3.12.0 does not support .NET framework 4.5.  It does support .NET framework 4.0 and this is where our fun began.