Sometimes you can't binary

Lately I've messed around with EBCDIC and ASCII. So I've got my head around the concept of encoding and sometimes its useful to encode data from one format into another. Now lets say you need to encode something in Base64.
Here are some pointers:
In .NET
Dim buf() As Byte
Dim strResult as String
buf = System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.ASCII.GetBytes("Some text")
Convert.ToBase64String(buf)
buf = Convert.FromBase64String(strResult)

In Java (Go here)
Get Base64Coder.java
String s;
s = Base64Coder.encodeString("some text");
s = Base64Coder.decodeString(s);

To verify, decode the encoded output from .NET in Java and vice-versa.