Where do you see the coin to be dead?  If you look at our Github (https://github.com/namecoin/namecoin-core/tree/dev), you'll see that we are regularly updating the code - about once per week usually.  We are usually on par with the bleeding-edge Bitcoin Core, integrated with Namecoin's functionality.

Apart from the core client, we've also other projects ongoing that build on top of it to further extend the Namecoin ecosystem.