I'm not an NHibernate user; I write a serialization utility library. A user has logged a feature-request that I should handle NHibernate proxy classes, treating them the same as the actual type. At the moment my code is treating them as unexpected inheritance, and throwing an exception.

The code won't know in advance about NHibernate (including no reference, but I'm not aftaid of reflection ;-p)

Is there a robust / guaranteed way of detecting such proxy types? Apparently DataContractSerializer handles this fine, so I'm hoping it is something pretty simple. Perhaps some interface or [attribute] decoration.

Also, during deserialization; at the moment I would be creating the original type (not the NHibernate type). Is this fine for persistence purposes? Or is the proxy type required? If the latter; what is required to create an instance of the proxy type?