Generate short unique identifier in .NET apps
I was reading a Stackoverflow question about generating short unique identifiers in C# and saw people are using baseline date time and time difference for ID generation. I really like the idea and wondered how that could be shortened even more. After some attempts, I found it is possible to use a combination of Unix epoch and a counter to make a short unique identifier with only 11 characters. How this works? Unix epoch in C# is represented as a long 64-bit integer value. Due to the range of DateTime in C#, the first 2 bytes of the 8 bytes of the 64-bit value are always 0. So that gives us 2 bytes to place a counter value in. The best choice here is an unsigned short value, with a range from 0 to 65535, giving us 65536 unique IDs per epoch value. In another word, as long as the number of ID generation does not exceed 65536 per millisecond, this approach should work. The final ID is base64 encoded string representation of the generated long integer. With Base64, 8 bytes