Heya AMGuy. Welcome to our forums and thanks for your interest in NetworkComms.Net.
You can indeed handle any serialisation and deserialisation yourself, just using NetworkComms for the sending and receiving. As far as NetworkComms is concerned you are only ever sending and receiving byte[], i.e. in the case of incoming data the subclass you would specify <byte[]>.
For reference the performance of the binarywriter is OK for small classes, where the serialised size is <10KB, but becomes increasingly poor for anything larger. The default serialiser/deserialiser used by NetworkComms.Net is Protobuf which does require implicit links if used with inherited classes. You can also change the default serialiser/deserialiser to binarywriter in NetworkComms, avoiding the need to add the code yourself, please see the advanced send example in the source download bundle for an example.
If you have any more questions please feel free to post back.
Regards,
Marc