title: AjaxControlToolkit combobox substitute for a large number of items
body: <p>I have a location using our ASP.NET 4.0 web application which was running fine for about 2 years. I went out on site to do an upgrade and found that one of the pages would just be blank and IE 8 would completely stop responding. Upon investigation I found that one of the comboboxes on a page had over 8000 items. The page loaded fine in IE7, IE9, Firefox, and Chrome. I looked at the documentation at that Ajax Control Toolkit site and they say that I should be using the Auto Complete Extender since I have such a high number of records. I figure it is only a matter of time before it doesn't work in any browser. The facility uses IE8, so I currently have them running in compatibility mode; I then told them to start deleting old records that they don't need anymore. However, I need to begin working on a substitute. The problem with the Auto Complete Extender is that it doesn't work anything like the combobox. Does anyone know of a good approach? I need to keep the DataSource and DataBinding style in the code-behind. Also, redesign is not an option. I need that list to contain all Visitors for any given facility.</p>