Simply stated, the web service accepts text in the ASCII format and converts it to Base64 format. For example, it takes the connection string for a database connection shown in Figure 1 and converts it into a machine readable Base64 format shown in Figure 2. While Figure 1 is easy to read, Figure 2 is not.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Details of how this web service is created have been described in an earlier tutorial while only a few screen shots of its description are shown here. The web service is created using the Visual Studio 2005 IDE along the lines fully documented in the above article.