Discussion at http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/ archive/2004/09/07/226306.aspx:

For some reason, this question gets asked a lot. How do I convert a byte[] to a System.String? (Yes, this is a CLR question. Sorry.)

You can use String System.Text.UnicodeEncoding.GetString() which takes a byte[] array and produces a string.

Note that this is not the same as just blindly copying the bytes from the byte[] array into a hunk of memory and calling it a string. The GetString() method must validate the bytes and forbid invalid surrogates, for example.

You might be tempted to create a string and just mash the bytes into it, but that violates string immutability and can lead to subtle problems.

The MSDN help for Encoding.GetString() is here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp? url=/library/en-us/cpref/html/ frlrfSystemTextEncodingClassGetStringTopic1.asp