I recently guest-hosted Episode 69 the PowerScripting Podcast. One of the items we discussed was a port scanning script from TheAdminGuy blog. Here’s the original script: http://theadminguy.wordpress.com/2009/04/30/portscan-with-powershell/. As written, there’s nothing technically wrong with it. The script gets the job done and tells the user which ports are open. However, I thought this was an opportunity to demonstrate an even more PowerShell-like approach. Even the author admits there are limitations to his script.

Whenever I see a script like this, the first thing I try to do is separate the functionality. In the VBScript days we would write monolithic scripts to do everything. Sure, we might write a function or subroutine, but based on my forum experiences, even that was not a common occurrence. In PowerShell, we want to use smaller, cmdlet-like tools that leverage the pipeline.