title: Web Service to return unique auto incremented human readable id number
body: <p>I'm looking to create a simple web service that when polled returns a unique id. The ID has to be human readable (i.e. not a guid, probably in the form 000023) and is simply incremented by 1 each time its called.</p>
  
  <p>Now I need to consider that it may be called by two different applications at the same time and I don't want it to return the same number to each application.</p>
  
  <p>Is there another option than using a database to store the current number?</p>
  
  <p>Surely this has been done before, can anyone point me at some source code if it is. </p>
  
  <p>Thanks,</p>
  
  <p>Neil</p>