PowerShell: test connection in as few characters as possible

Question

I need this down to as few characters as possible. I would use Test-NetConnection but I need PSv2 compatability. Any help would be appreciated.

$socket = new-object Net.Sockets.TcpClient
$socket.Connect("192.168.5.5",445)
$socket.Connected

As a note I have tried this but it doesn't work

(new-object Net.Sockets.TcpClient).Connect("192.168.5.5",445).Connected

Answer 1

PowerShell v2+, 63 bytes

You can use a different constructor to create the object and connect in one go.

(new-object Net.Sockets.TcpClient('192.168.5.5',445)).Connected

I've verified this works in v2 on my Windows 8.1 machine. That constructor is supported by .NET 2.0, so this should be v2 compatible.

Answer 2

AFAIK, there's no default alias for New-Object, and no type accelerator for Net.Sockets.TcpClient, so they can't be any shorter. You can merge the constructor and connect code into one line:

(New-Object Net.Sockets.TcpClient -A 192.168.5.5,445)

But if it can't connect, it now throws an exception, which you can't silence with -ErrorAction. So handling that ends up being 70 characters, only 8 shorter than your original after shrinking the variable name:

!!$(try{(new-object net.sockets.tcpclient -A 192.168.5.5,445)}catch{})

!! forcing the result to a bool.