My little compression helper...improved version
I posted my compression helper class before and realised almost instantly that it suffered from 'legacy lag' - so it'd been changed so much over the months that it was really bad!
Anyway, presented below is a modified version of that class (which I've also tried out my new formatting scheme on) as a reminder, it's just a simple wrapper around SharpZipLib.
using System;using System.Text;using System.IO;using ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib;namespace SerializableJob.Compression
{
public enum CompressionType
{
GZip, BZip2, Zip
} public class Compression { public static CompressionType CompressionProvider = CompressionType.GZip; private static Stream OutputStream(Stream inputStream) { switch(CompressionProvider) { case CompressionType.BZip2: return new ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.BZip2.BZip2OutputStream(inputStream); case CompressionType.GZip: return new ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.GZip.GZipOutputStream(inputStream); case CompressionType.Zip: return new ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip.ZipOutputStream(inputStream); default: return new ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.GZip.GZipOutputStream(inputStream); } } private static Stream InputStream(Stream inputStream) { switch(CompressionProvider) { case CompressionType.BZip2: return new ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.BZip2.BZip2InputStream(inputStream); case CompressionType.GZip: return new ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.GZip.GZipInputStream(inputStream); case CompressionType.Zip: return new ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.Zip.ZipInputStream(inputStream); default: return new ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.GZip.GZipInputStream(inputStream); } } public static byte[] Compress(byte[] bytesToCompress) { MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(); Stream s = OutputStream(ms); s.Write(bytesToCompress,0, bytesToCompress.Length); s.Close(); return ms.ToArray(); } public static string Compress(string stringToCompress) { byte[] compressedData = CompressToByte(stringToCompress); string strOut = Convert.ToBase64String(compressedData); return strOut; } public static byte[] CompressToByte(string stringToCompress) { byte[] bytData = Encoding.Unicode.GetBytes(stringToCompress); return Compress(bytData);; } public string DeCompress(string stringToDecompress) { string outString = string.Empty; if (stringToDecompress == null) { throw new ArgumentNullException("stringToDecompress","You tried to use an empty string"); } try { byte[] inArr = Convert.FromBase64String(stringToDecompress.Trim()); outString = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetString(DeCompress(inArr)); } catch (NullReferenceException nEx) { return nEx.Message; } return outString; } public static byte[] DeCompress(byte[] bytesToDecompress) { byte[] writeData = new byte[4096]; Stream s2 = InputStream(new MemoryStream(bytesToDecompress)); MemoryStream outStream = new MemoryStream(); while(true) { int size = s2.Read(writeData,0,writeData.Length); if(size>0) { outStream.Write(writeData,0,size); } else { break; } } s2.Close(); byte[] outArr = outStream.ToArray(); outStream.Close(); return outArr; } } 
}