When creating Fields, Content Types, solution packages, etc., in SharePoint, you’ll make heavy use of GUIDs. However, it seems to be hit-or-miss as to whether SharePoint expects the curly brackets surrounding a GUID.
I spent several hours today trying to get a solution package deployed that would provision some fields into my site collection. When I activated the feature, the fields would not get provisioned. There was no error in the SharePoint error log, no error in the server’s Event Log. There was no trace of an error anywhere, except for the fact that my fields were not there! I finally added curly brackets to the ID GUID of my Field elements, and voila, the fields got provisioned. *Sigh*…