Why are there dashes in a .NET GUID?

Question

Why are there dashes in a .NET GUID? Are there dashes in most implementations of a GUID, or is it just a Microsoft thing?

Signed,

741ecf77-9c92-4435-8e6b-859

Answer 1

Hyphens denote the byte structure of a Guid.

typedef struct _GUID 
{  
   DWORD Data1;  
   WORD Data2;  
   WORD Data3;  
   BYTE Data4[8];
} GUID;

For:

(XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXX)

You can probably strip them before saving. At least in .NET the constructor of the Guid type will initialize a Guid variable from its string representation regardless of whether the hyphens are still there or removed.