C# check if a COM (Serial) port is already open

Question

Is there an easy way of programmatically checking if a serial COM port is already open/being used?

Normally I would use:

try {     // open port } catch (Exception ex) {     // handle the exception } 

However, I would like to programatically check so I can attempt to use another COM port or some such.

Answer 1

I needed something similar some time ago, to search for a device.

I obtained a list of available COM ports and then simply iterated over them, if it didn't throw an exception i tried to communicate with the device. A bit rough but working.

var portNames = SerialPort.GetPortNames();  foreach(var port in portNames) {     //Try for every portName and break on the first working }