It's worth learning!

With regard to software I could be wrong but I believe that Visual Studio Express[/url] is all that you need. The CLR stuff comes in useful in other areas for instance with Regular Expressions or for making external web service calls.

One hacky way to support changing the separator character is to use something obscure in the code such as '¦' and then use the T-SQL REPLACE function to substitute it as required.

Personally I just have a version for comma (',') and then another that uses semi-colon (';') as that keeps the usage of the function simple.