Generating Interface UUIDs

This section presents information on Universal Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) and the Uuidgen utility in the following topics:

• What is a UUID?
• Using Uuidgen

All interfaces must be uniquely identified on a network so that clients can find them. On small networks, the interface's name alone may be sufficient to identify it. However, that is usually not feasible on large networks. Therefore, developers typically assign a Universal Unique Identifier (UUID, interchangeable with the term GUID, or Globally Unique Identifier) to each interface. A UUID is a string that contains a set of hexadecimal digits. Each interface has a different UUID. For details, see String UUID.

The textual representation of a UUID is a string consisting of 8 hexadecimal digits followed by a hyphen, followed by three hyphen-separated groups of 4 hexadecimal digits, followed by a hyphen, followed by 12 hexadecimal digits. The following example is a valid UUID string:

ba209999-0c6c-11d2-97cf-00c04f8eea45

Empty UUIDs are referred to as nil UUIDs rather than NULL UUIDs. The term nil indicates anything that is zero, blank, empty, or uninitialized. An empty string, an empty database record, or an uninitialized UUID are all examples of nil values.

Microsoft provides a utility program called Uuidgen to generate your UUIDs. The Uuidgen utility generates the UUID in IDL file format or C-language format.

When you run the Uuidgen utility from the command line, you can use the following command switches.

Typically, you will use the Uuidgen utility as shown in the following example.

uuidgen -i -oMyApp.idl

This command generates a UUID and stores it in a MIDL file that you can use as a template. When the preceding command is executed, the contents of MyApp.idl are similar to the following:

[
  uuid(ba209999-0c6c-11d2-97cf-00c04f8eea45),
  version(1.0)
]
interface INTERFACENAME
{

}

The next step would be to replace the placeholder name, INTERFACENAME, with the actual name of your interface.