Are GUIDs generated on Windows CE devices using the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 still statistically unique?

Question

I know that you can bang away at GUID generation on single and multiple machines and it's statistically unlikely to ever generate the same GUID twice.

There is lots of information on the internet proving this.

Can the same be said of 100s of Windows CE 4, 5 & 6 devices running applications based on the .NET Compact Framework 3.5 generating GUIDs?

I'm assuming yes but can't find any information proving that the WinCE OS uses random numbers and that they are suitably random.

Can anybody provide such information and references?

Thanks,

J.

Answer 1

From an early article on Guid for the .NET Compact Framework

The .NET Compact Framework team constantly made tradeoffs between the framework footprint size, performance, and implementation time. The full .NET Framework Guid.NewGuid method calls the Windows API function CoCreateGuid that calls UuidCreate to generate globally unique 128-bit numbers. Unfortunately, these functions are not supported on the Pocket PC, so the Guid.NewGuid method was not implemented for the .NET Compact Framework.

This article proposes an algorithm which equals the windows version

It turns out that it's easy to write a custom implementation of the Guid.NewGuid method. The following shows a test application that generates GUIDs on the Pocket PC. It uses a custom class called PocketGuid, that uses the same algorithm as desktop GUIDs and is discussed in more detail later in this paper.

Since 2.0 the actual compact framework contains the Guid.NewGuid method, I would think they included the mentioned code which results in the same strongness / uniqueness of Guids on WinCE.