Encoding string to Base64 / UTF8

Sometimes you need to convert strings to Base64, for example in security components. The function below does this:

public string stringToBase64(string s)
{
    try
    {
        byte[] bytes = new byte[s.Length];
        bytes = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(s);
        return Convert.ToBase64String(bytes);
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        throw new Exception("stringToBase64 error: " + e.Message);
    }
}