.NET Short Unique Identifier

Question

I need a unique identifier in .NET (cannot use GUID as it is too long for this case).

Do people think that the algorithm used here is a good candidate or do you have

Answer 1

As far as I know, just stripping off a part of a GUID isn't guaranteed to be unique - in fact, it's far from being unique.

The shortest thing that I know that guarantees global uniqueness is featured in this blog post by Jeff Atwood. In the linked post, he discusses multiple ways to shorten a GUID, and in the end gets it down to 20 bytes via Ascii85 encoding.

However, if you absolutely need a solution that's no longer than 15 bytes, I'm afraid you have no other choice than to use something which is not guaranteed to be globally unique.