In my WCF solution, the server doesn't need to know the data type. The client will send a type and receive the same type.
For performance reasons I think I could implement serialization manually in the client proxy, avoiding WCF builtin serialization on the server side, but there is any way to achieve the same goal just configuring WCF properly?
The whole basic architecture of WCF is based on the client calling a server, sending a serialized message.
That's the very foundation of WCF - message passing. You cannot turn that off. You can tweak it - but you can't remove it.
As for custom serialization - Check out Aaron Skonnard's excellent Serialization in WCF article in MSDN Magazine.
You can go as far as creating your own custom serializer for WCF - if you really want to - but why??
Why do you as a single developer or small shop want to "compete" with a pretty sizeable team at Microsoft and re-invent the wheel of serialization yet again? I would much rather concentrate on my real business issues which Microsoft cannot solve for me, but let the "infrastructure glue" be their game - they're good at it, and they have much more manpower and resources for that stuff!
Just make the type that you pass back and forth to the server have something like a byte[] property. Then you can serialize your known type on the client. The server would only have to know the opaque bytes
I think that protobuf-net customizes the serialization. If I look into its source code, I could understand how to achieve my goals