I'm loading in external bitmaps for my buttons to display. The bitmaps are being loaded fine. The buttons however are not displaying the bitmaps.

The images are HANDLE's. I'm setting the button to display the bitmap with SendMessage(buttonHwnd, BM_SETIMAGE, (WPARAM)IMAGE_BITMAP, (LPARAM)bitmapHandle)

I've also set the buttons style to BS_BITMAP.

I don't want to use resources, I want to load the images at run time from external sources.