Including Device Update in your ROM
Including DeviceUpdate is quite easy - however there are a number of things that may not be obvious that need to be accounted for.
Due to the auto-update nature of DeviceUpdate, you will always need to install DeviceUpdate via a CAB file. This means using either preconfig.txt or config.txt for installation. This will install DeviceUpdate during the device customisation stage.
This is important because otherwise when an update to DeviceUpdate is released, it will not be able to overwrite the included files - causing a failed install. It also means that the only way to upgrade to the latest verison of DeviceUpdate will be to get a rebuilt ROM with a newer version - something we want to avoid at all costs.
The CAB file cleanup routines in Windows Mobile are thorough. Very thorough. This presents us with a problem however. During an upgrade, the old CAB is automatically uninstalled before the new one is installed. During the uninstall progress, if the first registry entry for DeviceUpdate is created by the installation of DeviceUpdate, then it will wipe ALL registry entries in HKLM\Software\DeviceUpdate. This means we lose our list of currently installed applications. This is not a good thing.
To combat this, you can create the registry key HKLM\Software\DeviceUpdate during the cooking process with a .rgu file. This will mean that the uninstallation routine from Windows Mobile will not remove everything in HKLM\Software\DeviceUpdate.
With that in mind, you can download the current version of DeviceUpdate below.
DeviceUpdate v2.1.1.1