I downloaded the noesis samples from guthub and I can't run them.

Usually this task is pretty simple: open an .sln file, hope it will compile, and run.
With noesis, there is no .sln for any of the x64 windows projects, nor a proper readme to explain how to set up the build environment.

Trying to load the project file on VS 2017 and compile it doesn't work (it just "fails", no compiler errors emitted)/
Obviously, I can try to manually reverse engineer everything and manually add the relevant files and dependencies to my own projects. But I was hoping there is a simple solution.

any suggestions?

Please, download the latest C++ SDK from our page. You can download the latest stable from Downloads but I recommend the latest 2.2 beta.

Github is supposed to be a mirror of our samples, to easily browse them online, accept pullrequests, etc but you won't find the compiled libraries there.
Now that we are updating all the 2.2 samples I will take time to explain this in the README.md. Thanks!

thanks jsantos, I recommend you put a small sentence on the github page indicating that. have a nice day!

We will do that. Thanks again!