>It appears I will need to use the MD5 16 bytes calculation faster than expected. We just got a new option we have to do and we will verify for duplicates. If anyone has already the code for calculating a MD5 into a character 16 field in VB.NET that would like to share, feel free to post a reply.
>
>Thanks

The output of an MD5 hash is a byte[16]. If you want chars, you'll need to convert the bytes to hex, but this doubles the size
You do not need to convert to hex if you use a binary(16) field in sql server

The class here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.md5(v=vs.110).aspx

has a method ComputeHash() with 3 overloads http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.security.cryptography.md5_methods(v=vs.110).aspx

There's an example at the bottom.

To compute the hash for a file you would open the file and pass the stream to ComputeHash()