5 things you didn't know about Guid in C#

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I’m pretty sure that you’ve already used Guids in C#, but have you ever stopped to think what they are under the hood?

#1: Guids have a fixed size

A GUID is a 128-bit integer (16 bytes) value. That means that there are more than 300, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 different values. A big number, isn’t it?

It is virtually impossible to have duplicates, so it is safe to use.

Notice that an unsigned long is made of 64 bits: the biggest integral value that we can have has half of the bits of a Guid. The only type with the same size is decimal, but here we must consider both the sign and the precision.

#2: Guid is a struct

Just like int and short, a Guid is a struct and not an object.

public struct Guid : IComparable, IComparable, IEquatable, IFormattable

Since this is a value type, if we pass it to a method, it won’t change its value:

void Main()
{ var initialGuid = Guid.NewGuid(); Console.WriteLine("Before: "+ initialGuid); updateGuid(initialGuid); Console.WriteLine("After: "+ initialGuid);
} void updateGuid(Guid tmpGuid){ tmpGuid = Guid.NewGuid();
}

will print

Before: d7241bf7-2778-42a9-a2e2-99228ada8c54
After: d7241bf7-2778-42a9-a2e2-99228ada8c54

But, if we use the ref keyword

void Main()
{ var initialGuid = Guid.NewGuid(); Console.WriteLine("Before: "+initialGuid); updateGuidRef(ref initialGuid); Console.WriteLine("AfterRef: "+initialGuid);
} void updateGuidRef( ref Guid tmpGuid)
{ tmpGuid = Guid.NewGuid();
}

we will have

Before: f93239da-4d20-4cb9-a8b7-df9002e4a042
AfterRef: b4274547-089b-42c9-a2d1-5d4d3a62f37a

#3: You can create a Guid

For sure, the typical way of creating a Guid is using the static method Guid.NewGuid(). There are other ways to generate them.

If you want to create an empty Guid, you can use Guid.Empty: it will return a Guid composed only by 0s, like 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000. Since we are talking about a struct, it doesn’t make sense to have a null value, of course!

If you already have a GUID stored as string, you can parse it with Guid.Parse and Guid.TryParse. Just like for DateTime and for integers, the first one works only if the input string has a valid value, the second one tries to parse a value and assign it to a variable.

var guid1 = Guid.Parse("fc072692-d322-448b-9b1b-ba3443943579");
Console.WriteLine("Guid1: " + guid1); Guid.TryParse("fc072692-d322-448b-9b1b-ba3443943579", out var guid2);
Console.WriteLine("Guid2: "+guid2);

You can also use the simple constructor, like

var guid = new Guid("fc072692-d322-448b-9b1b-ba3443943579");

or some of the more advanced constructors that operate at low level: for example, you can use a byte array as an input to the constructor, and have it converted to Guid.
Of course, the array must be of 16 bytes.

var bytes = new byte[16];
var guid = new Guid(bytes);

#4: A Guid has multiple formats

Now that you know that a Guid is made of 16 bytes, you can think “are the hyphens part of those bytes?”.

Well, no: those are part of the default string representation of a Guid.

When using the ToString() method you can specify the format that you want. There are different types:

  • D: 32 digits, but with the hyphens. This is the default
  • N: 32 digits, without any other symbols
  • B: here we have the hyphens, and the string is enclosed in braces
  • P: similar to B, but with parentheses instead of braces
  • X: here we have the hexadecimal representation of the guid.

If we try to print the same Guid with the different formats, we can have something like

var tmpGuid = Guid.NewGuid();
Console.WriteLine("D t"+tmpGuid.ToString("D"));
Console.WriteLine("N t"+tmpGuid.ToString("N"));
Console.WriteLine("B t"+tmpGuid.ToString("B"));
Console.WriteLine("P t"+tmpGuid.ToString("P"));
Console.WriteLine("X t"+tmpGuid.ToString("X"));

that will print

D e10deb88-171b-4c34-81f7-05fc17d16316
N e10deb88171b4c3481f705fc17d16316
B {e10deb88-171b-4c34-81f7-05fc17d16316}
P (e10deb88-171b-4c34-81f7-05fc17d16316)
X {0xe10deb88,0x171b,0x4c34,{0x81,0xf7,0x05,0xfc,0x17,0xd1,0x63,0x16}}

Do you remember the Guid.Parse method that I showed before? Well, there is a secret sibling! Guid.ParseExact converts a string into a Guid only if it has the expected format.

So

Guid.ParseExact("(e10deb88-171b-4c34-81f7-05fc17d16316)", "P");

will work, but

Guid.ParseExact("(e10deb88-171b-4c34-81f7-05fc17d16316)", "N");

and

Guid.ParseExact("{e10deb88-171b-4c34-81f7-05fc17d16316}", "P");

won’t.

#5: Guids have NOT a fixed size

As I said, a Guid takes 16 bytes. So it’s easy to suppose that sizeof(Guid) will return 16.

Well… no! It doesn’t even compile, because _’Guid’ does not have a predefined size; therefore you can use sizeofonly in an unsafe context.

That’s because the size of a Guid is constant, but the memory allocated by the CLR isn’t necessary constant (because for some architecture it can add a padding at the end, at the beginning or within the allocated memory).

So, you can see the value in 2 ways:
using the unsafe operator

unsafe
{ sizeof(Guid);
}

or using the Marshal.SizeOf method from System.Runtime.InteropServices.

Marshal.SizeOf()

Wrapping up

Not so boring, isn’t it? For sure, this is a great functionality of C#, and I hope I’ve triggered your curiosity about the hidden aspects of this language.

Happy coding!

Source: https://www.code4it.dev/blog/5-things-about-guid-in-csharp

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