There is nothing new about the SDK and AFAIK no release date has been set yet. And with Windows7 just around the corner and a ton of programs to update/test, there isn't much hope to have a release in the near future IMO.
Now, if you're really motivated, there are two options:
- You are an expert in DirectX and know how to program in C/C++. If you have a portfolio or a few 3D programs to show, you can contact Stardock (I don't know who exactly is handling this thing, so your best bet is to send an email to support and they will route you to the right person) and ask for access to the SDK (under NDA). I can't promise you they will give you access, but if you have the skills and motivation, there's a good chance. If not, go to (2)
- You don't want to sign NDAs
and you know enough about lowlevel windows programming, calling conventions and stuff like that, as well as basic D3D. Go to google and search for DeskScapes SDK. There is some old info on dynamic dreams. It's outdated, doesn't work out of the box and some of the stuff is wrong/incomplete. Any seasoned win32/d3d programmer should be able to make it work though.
I chose 2 (did it independently at around the same time - Sept 2007) and didn't sign any evil NDA 
. With all the available info, it's so much easier compared to starting from scratch. Since then though, I haven't seen any dynamic dreams other than from Stardock, so I'm not sure there is so much interest really (from people who could actually code a dynamic dream).
I can't help you anymore than that as I gave my word not to give out specific technical info, but if you manage to build dynamic dreams, you might be interested in two small utilities I wrote: DreamBuilder which is a command line equivalent to DreamMaker and Nightmares which allows to run dreams in a window directly from the dll file/record a video/help debugging (no need to build a .dream file, load it and crash explorer in a loop anymore
). That's it for the shameless plug...
Good luck!
