VISUAL STUDIO FEEDS

So how is it that a GUID can be guaranteed to be unique without some sort of central authority that ensures uniqueness, a la the ISBN system? Well, first off, notice that the number of possible GUIDs is vastly larger than the number of possible ISBNs. Because the last of the thirteen digits is a checksum, there are only 1012 possible ISBNs. That is about a hundred unique ISBNs for every person on earth. That's almost exactly 240, so you could represent an ISBN by a 40 bit number (again, ignoring the checksum). There are 2128 possible GUIDs; that's

about 40 billion billion billion unique GUIDs for every person on earth. This alone gives us the intuition that it ought to be pretty easy to ensure that two of them never collide; there are a lot of GUIDs to choose from! There are a number of possible strategies for making a unique GUID, and in fact information about the strategy used is encoded in the first four bits of the third "group"; almost every GUID you see will be of the form {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-1xxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx} or {xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}. If there is a one in that place then the algorithm used to...(Read whole news on source site)