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 can tell, the only one which gives you access to the numeric status code (e.g. 200, 404), is the last, the COM object. The problem I have is that I don't like the way it works and I don't like relying on the COM object being there. I also know that from time to time Microsoft will decide to kill COM objects (ActiveX kill bits) due to security vulnerabilities and so on.
Is there another .NET method I'm missing? Is the status code in one of these other two objects and I just don't know how to get at it?