After an interval of more than 2 weeks, I am back online blogging. Today I will share a quick tip on how to create a guid in C# and vb.net. For a description about GUIDs, visit this Wikipedia page.A guid in the .net world is represented by the System.Guid class. The Guid class has many constructors which takes 0 or more arguments and constructs a guid from it. However, if we want to create a random guid, using the parameter less constructor would not do. A guid created using the parameter less constructor contains all zeros. So how to create a unique guid?

Guid.NewGuid() method

The Guid class has a static method named NewGuid() which creates and returns a new random guid. Let's see a example.

C#

Guid g=Guid.NewGuid();                             MessageBox.Show(g.ToString());

VB.NET

Dim g As Guid =Guid.NewGuid()                             MessageBox.Show(g.ToString())

Here we are simply creating a new guid and using ToString() method for displaying it. You can also get byte representation of the guid using ToByteArray() method.Enjoy!

Sometimes we may need to expand paths like "%systemroot%\program.exe" etc programmatically. Specially values in the registry are encoded in this format. The .net framework provides us a straightforward method using which we can easily convert strings containing such special variables into their values.

Environment.ExpandEnvironmentVariables() method

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