Stratix V Development board with QSFP ports

What I want to really do is write C code that doesn't run out of the external SDRAM but as the program is running, it writes data to the SDRAM and then reads it back at some stage. If I could write VHDL code to do this it would be even better. This way I can understand properly how data is written and read from RAM. Example code showing how this is done would be a super help.

In order to do this, must I specify a RAM address on the address lines connected to the SDRAM, then place the data on the data lines? As these lines are parallel, i'm not sure how to do this in code. Should there be an address register and data register and the SDRAM controller takes care of converting from serial to parallel?

Cheers,

Paul