A few months ago I clicked a bookmarked link to an MSDN article about setting up the development environment for SharePoint 2010. Here is the link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx

To my amazement, I found that the article now contains content about setting up the development environment for SharePoint 2013. I tried to navigate to the same tree node in the SharePoint 2010 section, but it does not exist. That change must have happened not too long before, though, because I still found the 2010 article in the Google cache and quickly saved it to OneNote. Phew.

But of course, that cannot work forever. And other saved links, and lots and lots of links on web sites that refer to SharePoint 2010 MSDN pages now show 2013 version content. And no way of selecting a drop-down to show the content for another version.

When I looked through some of the Excel help, I noticed that every 2013 help page I visited had a drop-down to select the version, for example http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff194068.aspx . When the drop-down is selected, the URL changes, but not by much. The string “(v=office.14)” is added before the .aspx to produce http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff194068(v=office.14).aspx , which will show the 2010 version of the page.

The drop-down is not there on the SharePoint MSDN pages, but the URL change works all the same. So, if your saved MSDN bookmarks or links to MSDN about SharePoint 2010 now show SharePoint 2013 content, just edit the URL and insert

(v=office.14)

before the .aspx

For the article about setting up the development environment, I changed the URL from

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx

to read

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869(v=office.14).aspx

and hey, presto, there it was in all its glory and original content.

Now I can delete my OneNote page with the copy. (Or maybe I’ll keep it. Just in case…)

Cheers, teylyn