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

<p>Normally I would use:</p>

<pre><code>try
{
    // open port
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    // handle the exception
}
</code></pre>

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

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
}
```
```