How to generate a GUID in C#

C# is a strongly typed object-oriented programming language and is part of the .NET framework. The C# programming language is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and it is developed by Microsoft. C# it is open source and runs on MacOS, Linux and Windows operating systems.

The C# language has built in support for generating GUIDs. Below is an example of how to generate a GUID in C#:

1. using System;
2.  
3. namespace GuidGenerator {
4.     class Program {
5.         static void Main(string[] args) {
6.             var guid = Guid.NewGuid();
7.             Console.WriteLine("Your GUID is: " + guid.ToString());
8.         }
9.     }
10. }

Explanation

• On line #6, we declare a variable named guid and we use the Guid.NewGuid() static method to create a new GUID instance.
• On line #7, we use the Console.WriteLine() method to output the GUID value to console. We use the ToString() method to convert the GUID instance to a string.
• The output of the above program will be something similar to this one:
• Your GUID is: 032c99b2-d17e-41f6-9259-1f70958dc106

How to convert from a string to GUID in C#

Sometimes you might need to convert from a string representation of GUID back to an instance of Guid. C# has also built-in support to for this case:

1. using System;
2.  
3. namespace GuidGenerator {
4.     class Program {
5.         static void Main(string[] args) {
6.             var guidAsString = "032c99b2-d17e-41f6-9259-1f70958dc106";
7.             var guid = new Guid(guidAsString);
8.             Console.WriteLine("Your GUID is: " + guid.ToString());
9.         }
10.     }
11. }

Explanation

• On line #6, we declare a variable of type string named guidAsString and we set its value to a string representation of a Guid.
• On line #7, we declare a variable of type Guid and we use it's constructor to instantiate it. The constructor takes the above variable as a parameter.
• The output of the above program will be something similar to this one:
• Your GUID is: 032c99b2-d17e-41f6-9259-1f70958dc106