And Boost.Functional was only added in version 1.72, released in December 2019. It is very recent. (I have no idea what Boost version OP has).
I'm not going to comment about the second screenshot though - sometimes VS does not find the header locations after you manually specify them in some project setting somewhere which causes complaints in the Problems Window. But as long as the MSBuild compiler can find the headers then it should be OK.
Also, it is not possible to install Boost by simply copying its header files. That might work for some header-only projects but Boost has a ton of source files that need to be compiled. I recommend simply installing/updating the NuGet package for Boost instead.
Actually no. If OP did get the boost libraries from the sln/project, he should have 1.72.0.0 and upgrading to 1.78 is unnecessary.
And I really hope that OP did as he claims he did, hence getting the NuGet packages, so he should have correct and complete boost libraries.
You can look into builds\msvc\vs2017\libbitcoin-system\libbitcoin-system.vcxproj and builds\msvc\vs2017\libbitcoin-system-examples\libbitcoin-system-examples.vcxproj, and you'll see boost 1.72 is referred.
That error should not happen since the NuGet package should have set the correct paths and the files should be there. That's why I'm so confused why that error comes, especially since OP said he did compile the lib already (Libbitcoin).
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I fear he may have removed some dependencies or something... I've installed VS onto a fresh VM so I can see what could have gone wrong, but it's slooooow...
Edit: Adding here the updates
OP, I couldn't find a definitely sure thing that went wrong on your side.
I don't know if the example project no longer depends on the lib project, I don't know if the path is not too long.
I've installed Visual Studio onto a pretty much fresh virtual machine, I made one more movie for you.
One thing I'd like to ask you: please don't work on desktop. Make a C:\Temp and work there if you don't have a better place.
The movie is: https://we.tl/t-DuKKxSoA9U
Some parts I've skipped but it's still awfully long since the machine was slow. You may want to increase the speed at playing. You may want to start looking from minute 18:10 or even 20:00.
You may want to start with fresh Libbitcoin, since I don't know what's broken.
I did, all the step , Just like in 2 movies that You've shared. Compiled the library (system) project and (examples) project, and compiled and run the main.cpp
and It worked!
https://i.ibb.co/54W6jrn/Capture11.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/QDLFwN4/Capture22.jpg
Although there are still messages that some file is not found.....
My obvious mistake, in this case, was that I forgot to compile the "Examples" project.
Thank you for your time and help, I appreciate that
but it looks like it would be better to just learn elliptic curves with Python and the book "Programming Bitcoin" by Jimmy Song