The Microsoft Windows Phone Toolkit team has announced the release of the Windows Phone 8 version of the Windows Phone Toolkit and provided an overview of its features.

As we reported at the time, the WP8 SDK was released on October 31st and now, three weeks later, Microsoft has blogged about its availability.

The main feature of the new toolkit, according to Adam Denning, is the fact it includes both the Windows Phone 7 and 8 kits in a single package.

Other changes are Map API extensions for Windows Phone 8, including a Modern PushPin control. There’s a new LongListMultiSelector control that lets you have multiple selections on Grid view, and the control themes have been updated to match the Windows Phone 8 UI. A number of bug fixes have also been incorporated.

The blog post gives step-by-step instructions for installing the SDK, being careful to remind you that it requires NuGet version 2.1. It also gives steps for writing a simple “hello world” unit test using the Windows Phone Toolkit Test Framework.

This is a useful post for beginners to Windows Phone development but has misled some developers into thinking there's a new release due to its timing.