One of the odd things that's not included in SQL Server 2005 is a simple split function for strings. Given that you can't send table variables in as input parameters, you're often required to send in delimited strings. But with no split function, it's painful to parse.
So the answer is to write the split function (or whatever other function you desire) in ASP.NET (in this case, I wrote mine in C#) and then you can wire it up to SQL Server 2005 and call it as a function.
The instructions for doing so are outside of the scope of this particular document, but something that I've run into a couple of times now is this error message:
Execution of user code in the .NET Framework is disabled. Enable "clr enabled" configuration option.Option? Enable? Configuration? Sounds like it should be somewhere in the SQL Server properties. But it's not! So you need to run this SQL query:
EXEC sp_configure 'clr enabled', 1;
GO
RECONFIGURE WITH OVERRIDE;
GO
That's all there is to it. If you want to reverse, run the same code but with a zero instead of a 1 in the first line.