If you want to use the shorthand you can make use of conditional logic with the following shorthand. Only the string ‘false’ will evaluate to true (2.0).

#Done in Powershell 2.0 
$boolean = $false;
$string = "false";
$emptyString = "";

If($boolean){
    # this does not run because $boolean is false
    Write-Host "Shorthand If conditions can be nice, just make sure they are always boolean."
}

If($string){
    # This does run because the string is non-zero length
    Write-Host "If the variable is not strictly null or Boolean false, it will evaluate to true as it is an object or string with length greater than 0."
}

If($emptyString){
    # This does not run because the string is zero-length
    Write-Host "Checking empty strings can be useful as well."
}

If($null){
    # This does not run because the condition is null
    Write-Host "Checking Nulls will not print this statement."
}