Guess who is a library for generating realistic sample identity information. Version 1 is limited to just names. Contributors who would like to assist in adding other types of identity information are welcome.

Some ideas for future versions

• Realistic addresses, configurable to different countries
• Realistic phone numbers
• Other personal details such as date of birth

The list of names and their relative frequency was taken from the US census data. This information is publicly available here. The frequency data of the names to produce the names is used to produce more of the common names and less of the more obscure ones.

These name files come embedded in the assembly, but if you would like to you can implemented your own custom ICensusDataFileProvider to load them from some other location.

GuessWho is available on nuget. Two version have been published GuessWho and GuessWho.Top1000.

GuessWho.Top1000 is a cut down version that only includes 1,000 of each type of name. This saves quite a lot of space as the full version assembly weighs in at 919KB compared to 45KB for the cut down version.

If you're a Mercurial users you might like head over to the project's bitbucket repository if you're already at the bitbucket repository, but looking for a git one head over to the github repository.

First of all create a new instance of NameGenerator class.

	var randomName = new NameGenerator();
	

You can then get new names by using any of the following methods.

	var boysName = randomName.NextMaleName();
	var girlsName = randomName.NextFemaleName();
	var whoKnowsName = randomName.NextName();
	

If you use the NextName() method you can find out what gender the name is using the Gender property.

	if (whoKnowsName.Gender == Gender.Male)
		Console.WriteLine("It's a boy!");
	else
		Console.WriteLine("It's a girl!");
		

For convenience there are also extension methods which allow you to IEnumerable's of names.

	const int takeCount = 2;

	Console.WriteLine("First {0} male names", takeCount);
	foreach (var name in randomName.MaleNames().Take(takeCount))
		Console.WriteLine(name);

	Console.WriteLine();

	Console.WriteLine("First {0} female names", takeCount);
	foreach (var name in randomName.FemaleNames().Take(takeCount))
		Console.WriteLine(name);

	Console.WriteLine();

	Console.WriteLine("First {0} all names", takeCount);
	foreach (var name in randomName.Names().Take(takeCount))
		Console.WriteLine(name);
		

First 2 male names
Steve Ashcraft
Christopher Timothy Bischoff

First 2 female names
Denise Jan Dellinger
Brigida Carpenter

First 2 all names
Ivan Brent Duffey
Christy Mildred Clark

If you would like a little bit more control over how names are generated you can use the RandomNameConfiguration class.

	
	var configuration = new RandomNameConfiguration()
		.Seed(1337) // Specify a custom seed so you can generate repeatable results
		.MaximumGivenNames(10) // Hey some people have more names than others the default is 3
		.CensusDataFileProvider(new CustomCensusDataFileProvider()) // Determine how the name files are loaded
		.NameFileTypeConvention(new CustomConvention()); // Control which files are treated as male or female

	var randomName = new NameGenerator(configuration);