Recently an article went up on MSDN about cryptography with the .NET framework. I've seen many articles like this. Know what? Almost every single one does what this article does - creates helper functions that take a chunk of plain text and return a chunk encrypted text. I must have seen this same chunk of code a dozen different times.
Perhaps this is an indication that the framework needs a couple of high-level encrypt/decrypt-a-string methods. The stuff that's in the framework is great, but apparently it's calling out for a couple of simple additions.
Although then article writers would have to come up with a new boilerplate sample, and it would be a shame to make their live's more difficult.