Does NHibernate support a native date type? There isn't one mentioned in the docs (though there is in the Hibernate docs), but when I set type="date" in one of my mapping files, it seems to be supported. Is there some magic going on here that I'm not seeing, with NHibernate automatically converting between the SQL and .NET date types?

If NHibernate does support dates, what other types does it support? Any .NET object? I notice that the docs list the options for value types and for large object types, but not for "normal" (I guess? the distinction between these and "large" types isn't made clear) types.

Sorry for what is probably a newbie question, still trying to get a handle on everything here.

NHibernate supports System.DateTime. If you have a property of this type, you don't even need to set type="...".
There is also NullableDateTime (in the Nullables library)...

Is this the case for most objects, to use Reflection (I guess) to work out the type of the property?

IMO, it is safer and I see no disadvantages of doing that.
But it is still required in few cases like Nullables, *LOB, etc.