Sometimes, you need to perform some in-memory compression of a large amount of text. You might want to write this to a file or a database. Perhaps you need to e-mail the text as an attachment that another system will pick up and then decompress. Whatever the reason, in-memory compression and decompression is a very useful feature to have around. The best way to do this is to use extension methods. If you haven't figured this out by now, I quite like using extension methods.