Ok So even I had this exception being thrown continuously. However, my case was a little different.
I wanted to get rid of this reference as it was no longer required in the project. So I removed it from the references. But while running the application, I started getting this exception at a Debug.WriteLine(...);
statement which suggested that the reference was required.
On further analysis, I found that the below section was present in the project's app.config
file which was the cause of the exception.
<trace>
<listeners>
<add type="Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics.DiagnosticMonitorTraceListener, Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Diagnostics, Version=2.8.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" name="AzureDiagnostics">
<filter type="" />
</add>
</listeners>
</trace>
After removing the reference AND also removing the above section from config file, the issue got fixed.
Hope this helps!