Bye Bye GuidGen.exe!

While developing in Visual Studio and I needed to create a new guid, I always used the “Create GUID” under the Tools dropdown menu. This menuitem started the “guidgen.exe” application and using this was a fine method, until I attended the last DevDays 2009 (The Hague, Netherlands). There I saw a demonstration of a much easier way to create a new guid in Visual Studio by making use of a simple macro. (Thanks Wouter) Below is the explanation on how to implement this macro. 1. Open the Macro Explorer and Load or Create a Macro Project. 2. Inside the macro IDE, create a method to generate a new guid. Imports System Imports EnvDTE Imports EnvDTE80 Imports EnvDTE90 Imports System.Diagnostics Public Module Module1 Sub GenerateGuid() If (DTE.ActiveDocument IsNot Nothing) Then DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text = Guid.NewGuid().ToString("B") End If End Sub End Module 3. Save and close the macro IDE. 4. For the finishing though, create a keyboard shortcut to activate the GeneratGuid macro. I like to use the combination CTRL+K, CTRL+G 5. Now it is so easy to create a new guid…..just by pressing your favourite keyboard shortcut.

Bye Bye GuidGen!