Debug assertion in MFC in VS2012

Question

I'm migrating a legacy GUI application to VS2012. When running this application in debug mode, I'm getting a debug assertion when I try to instantiate a toolbar with the following line of code:

if(!m_wndMain.Create(this) || !m_wndMain.LoadToolBar(IDR_MAIN))

After digging around in MFC code, I found that the following line has changed in bartool.cpp has changed in MSVC10->11 from:

if (lpBitmap == NULL)

to:

if ((lpBitmap == NULL) || (lpBitmap->biBitCount > 8))

in AfxLoadSysColorBitmap. In my case lpBitmap->biBitCount = 24 which causes AfxLoadSysColorBitmap to return NULL which in turn causes the debug assertion. Any ideas on how to rectify my program's behavior to avoid this debug assertion?

Answer 1

Apart from changing the bitmap to be 8-bit (256 colors) your best option is to use CMFCToolBar instead. This supports higher bit-depth bitmaps (including 24 and 32 bit) bitmaps.