Fast generation of Guid in Visual Studio (2005 and 2008)

I have had trouble with my Visual Studio not having GuidGen to create a Guid a few times. This bothered me a lot, and I didn’t want to go to a webpage to create a new Guid, and also didn’t want to do it through code.
So I found a solution to that. This is how you via a shortcut can create a Guid right at your cursor in Visual Studio. Quite nifty. I use this a lot in SharePoint development, especially when creating fields, content types etc. in CAML.

1: Open up Visual Studio. Goto Tools -> Macros -> Macro Explorer. Can also be accessed with Alt+F8.

2: Right-click “Macros” and choose “New Macro Project”.

3: Give it a name, and then rename “Module1″.

4: Doubleclick the module and copy paste this code in there and save the macro.

Sub Create_GUID()
        DTE.ActiveDocument.Selection.Text = System.Guid.NewGuid().ToString("D").ToUpper()
End Sub

The code goes just before “end module”.

5: Choose Tools -> Options and choose “Keyboard” under “Environment”.

6: In the “Show Commands Containing” textbox, you can find the module by entering “Create_guid”.

7: Press down your wanted shortcut in the “Press shortcut keys” textbox and then click “Assign”.

You can now press your chosen shortcut and a new Guid will appear right at your cursor. This not only makes you able to live without GuidGen, it’s a lot faster too!