I don't know if i am asking a silly question but I want to know whether Convert.ToBase64String function in .NET returns the same length as it's source byte size or is it different? I wanted to try out the article from MSDN itself [How To: Use Forms Authentication with SQL Server 2000](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa302398.aspx) to hash my password but I found out that the function they used to create salt string is returning 3 more length than it is supposed to return. To clarify here is the code in that article.

```
private static string CreateSalt(int size)
{
   // Generate a cryptographic random number using the cryptographic
   // service provider
   RNGCryptoServiceProvider rng = new RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
   byte[] buff = new byte[size];
   rng.GetBytes(buff);
   // Return a Base64 string representation of the random number
   return Convert.ToBase64String(buff);
}

```