How to get the NTLM hash of a string in .NET?

Question

Visual Basic

To get an NTLM hash from a string, you need to:
1) Convert the string to UTF-16 with the low endian byte sequence
2) Take the MD4 hash
Everything is clear with point two, but not so much with the first one. As far as I understand, if I write: is it already a Unicode string with a low endian byte sequence or not?
Dim str As String = "string"