Originally discovered in the context of cosmic strings, semilocal strings have recently resurfaced in the context of generalized D3/D7-brane inflation. While they differ in many ways from the more familiar Nielsen-Olesen vortex, semilocal strings share many of their features, not the least of which is the difficulty in solving the string equations and, subsequently, understanding the vortex dynamics. In this talk I show how a noncommutative deformation of the (2+1)-dimensional linear sigma model facilitates a construction of exact semilocal strings. I will discuss some of the more interesting properties of these solutions and show how to explicitly follow their deformation into instantons of a nonlinear sigma model. Finally, I show how these vortices may be realized in string theory via the Hanany-Witten construction and how this realization may be used to better understand the low energy dynamics of the semilocal string.