How to obtain numeric HTTP status codes in PowerShell

Question

I know of a few good ways to build web clients in PowerShell: the .NET classes System.Net.WebClient and System.Net.HttpWebRequest, or the COM object Msxml2.XMLHTTP. From what I

Answer 1

Using both x0n and joshua ewer's answers to come full circle with a code example, I hope that's not too bad form:

$url = 'http://google.com'
$req = [system.Net.WebRequest]::Create($url)

try {
    $res = $req.GetResponse()
} 
catch [System.Net.WebException] {
    $res = $_.Exception.Response
}

$res.StatusCode
#OK

[int]$res.StatusCode
#200