[Source: http://geekswithblogs.net/EltonStoneman]
* UPDATE: this post - Generating Deterministic GUIDS Part 2 - contains a Silverlight widget which generates GUIDs for you.
Recently I had a need to generate deterministic GUIDs for a string, so a given string would always result in the same unique id.
In the unlikely event you also have a need for it (mine related to UDDI Service Provider names), there's a very simple way to do it using an MD5 hash as an intermediate step:
private Guid GetDeterministicGuid(string input)
{
//use MD5 hash to get a 16-byte hash of the string:
MD5CryptoServiceProvider provider = new MD5CryptoServiceProvider();
byte[] inputBytes = Encoding.Default.GetBytes(input);
byte[] hashBytes = provider.ComputeHash(inputBytes);
//generate a guid from the hash:
Guid hashGuid = new Guid(hashBytes);
return hashGuid;
}
The input string can be of any length, and the hash will always be the same for a given input. MD5 generates a 128-bit hash, in the form of a 16 element byte array which can be parsed directly by System.Guid.