Reflection error with self-hosted nancyfx app on mono - reflection

Question

After building and successfully running a self-hosted NancyFx application on windows with visual studio I went on and tried to run the application on linux with mono. I was able to build the solution (using xbuild) but when running the app I get a strange error:
Unhandled Exception:
System.Reflection.TargetInvocationException: Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation. --->
System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type 'System.Net.HttpListener'
from assembly 'System, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,
PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089'.
at Microsoft.Owin.Host.HttpListener.OwinServerFactory.Initialize (IDictionary`2 properties) <0x413ae4f0 + 0x000eb> in <filename unknown>:0
For some reason, the app tries to initialize class HttpListener from the System assembly, but HttpListener lives in System.Netassembly. I looked in the GAC folder and found that System.Net is there as expected. I moved a copy to the bin folder where the other dependencies of the app live but that didn't solve the problem. Any help would be appreciated!!
here is my OWIN-related code:
// Startup.cs
using Owin;
namespace MyApp
{
public class Startup
{
public void Configuration(IAppBuilder app)
{
app.UseNancy();
}
}
}
// Program.cs
using System;
using Microsoft.Owin.Hosting;
namespace MyApp
{
public class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var url = "http://127.0.0.1:8080/";
using (WebApp.Start<Startup>(url))
{
Console.WriteLine("Running on {0}", url);
Console.WriteLine("Press enter to exit");
Console.ReadLine();
}
}
}
}

Answer 1

Yep, wrong assembly indeed.
Im not sure why yet, but I'm having the same issue with CENTOS only using mono 4.3.178. Debian Jesse using version 4.2.x had no issues. Several other Debian Jesse boxes I use to test seem to have no issues with 4.3.x. In my case I'm listening on an alternate port.
RedHat Strikes Again :/
A MUCH deeper stack trace into the IL seems to indicate that gcc on the machine you built mono on, and also the build essentials package have some extremely dated libs and even the compiler. I was surprised to see the number of warnings, nearly 70,000 as opposed to a typical 400 depending on the diversity of libs you have. I have about 10 hours to figure this out, so hopefully its not too bad.