help needed with string manipulation

Hi

I was wondering if you could show me how to do the following.

I have a string which is a series of variable = value pairs. Each set is separated by a semi colnn. Some of the values can themselves be a comma separated list.

Eg:
name=andrea;email=andrea@world.com;roles=admin,superuser;

I need to split this input. I would ideally like the result to be in a hashtable or soemthing where the key is the variable name. In the case of the roles variable, i would like the different roles to be stored in an arraylist. Could i store an array list as the value in a hashtable?

In this example, the hastable would contain the following:

key      value
name   andrea
email   andrea@world.com
roles    arraylist = (admin,superuser)

How would i go about doing this? I am awful with string manipulation in vb.net

Thanks very much
andrea